For £70, a father bought his son a present, the web name www.narnia.mobi. The 11 year old is a huge fan of CD Lewis and he used the domain for his e-mail address.
Then the estate of CS Lewis demanded that they hand over the name and WIPO concurred.
Family Loses Narnia Web Name
Cyberpunk Librarian
Systems librarian, podcaster, coder, musician, author, blogger, digital creative, and cyberpunk.
Good use
As you can tell from the link, the estate put it to really fine use. It’s just a page of text ads shoved over to the left side of the screen. Thank god they got their intellectual property back from an undeserving child who wasn’t making any money at all from it.
Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes. Tycho (Jerry Holkins) @ Penny Arcade
Agreed, Dragon
Nice one. Maybe the dad should register F*cktheWIPO.com before someone else does…
Wrong Lawyer
I don’t know why they didn’t go through a British court, but went straight to an international one, that is part of the United Nations. They should have gotten a lawyer, of if they had one, fired him.
Also, they should have offered to rent the rights to the registered name to the estate for a hefty sum. That is what a number of other people have done in the past when they registered a similar name to a know corporation. If the business won’t pay up, they fill the site with pornography and other disreputable stuff, and this encourage the comany to see reason.
Besides, I always thought you couldn’t copyright a title. You can trademark an item, such as the name Narnia, which is also the name of a commune of Terni, in Central Italy (Merriam Webster’s Geographical Dictionary, 3rd edition). I suspect that that ancient town is now in violation of the treaties of the United Nations, and might be in danger of being invaded by Belgium copyright police enforcers, otherwise known as the “WIPO Gestapo”, something they won’t do for the oppressed in Zimbabwe.
R. Lee Hadden (These are my own opinions!)