HW: .com

[Paul Mather]

On Sun, 7 Oct 2001, Ian Abrahams wrote:

=> From: Paul Mather <paul at GROMIT.DLIB.VT.EDU>
=>
=> Finally, personally, I think the band have treated Andy Gilham shabbily.
=> Last time I saw a band treating loyal fans like this, the words
=> "Metallica" and "Napster" seemed to be involved. :-)  You simply can't
=> buy bad publicity like this.  Good one, Hawkwind!
=>
=> Paul, that's unfair. The very detailed account posted by Rik this afternoon
=> should have cleared up the Hawkwind side of the story and you have already
=> accounted, yourself, for the fact that the domain is in the hands of
=> ownership other than the band. Nothing that's been posted over the weekend,
=> to my mind, suggests anything other than a compromise was available and not
=> taken up. Don't see that can be taken as the band's fault. The legal side of
=> things has also been comprehensively explained and surely the story ends
=> here.

It may be "unfair" from where you stand, but it's my perception, right
or wrong.  Maybe you don't think this has generated any ill will towards
the band.  I think it has, but I may be mistaken.  Not everything I
think is right or correct.  But then the same is true of us all.  And,
of course, Rik's very detailed account is just one side of the story,
and may not be entirely unbiased.

In Rik's recent posting, he made repeated complaint that Andy had
flagged the www.hawkwind.com site as "the official" Hawkwind WWW site,
which is basically the straw that broke the camel's back for them.
Andy reported here he long since removed any "official" monniker from
his WWW site (since the launching of Mission Control was the impression
I got).  So, someone is mistaken, there.  (Let's leave it to the spin
doctors to win that one.)

Also, as you bring up my earlier posting, you hopefully will appreciate
the point I tried to make that the hawkwind.com domain is registered to
EBS, not Andy Gilham, and that Andy has no control or ownership over the
hawkwind.com domain.  Sending a legal volley his way just further
illustrates the comedy of errors that is general Hawkwind "management"
(IMHO).  Asking Andy to "hand over the domain" is like asking me or you
to hand it over.  We can't.  We have no authority to do so.  He may
control the WWW site to which www.hawkwind.com points, but he doesn't
control the hawkwind.com domain (domain != host).

I do think that ownership of hawkwind.{com,net,org} should belong the
Hawkwind.  (They should also try and get hawklords.{com,net,org}, IMHO.)
But, issuing an ultimatum to Andy Gilham is not the way to go about it
(IMHO).

Reading the posts on here recently, I can't help feel that whether by
accident or design, Hawkwind have garnered themselves bad publicity over
they way this has played out.  I may be mistaken in this perception, but
I make no other observation than that.

Cheers,

Paul.

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
 deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
        --- Frank Vincent Zappa