HW: Domain Names - Short Sharp Shock

[Dan Witt]

What if somebody in another country had the name of your band for a site?
Like say somebody in Taiwan had registered hawkwind.com.  What could you do
across borders?  I just thought of that and some other things.

I'm not a lawyer but here's what I think; you can register and own any site
name you want.  However, you cannot claim to be "official" if you are not,
further if your domain name would give people the impression of being
official you would have to clearly state that the site was not official.  I
really believe that is it.  Also you couldn't use the name to sell products
you didn't have a right to, that applies anywhere though.

If someone wants the name bad enough they need to buy it from you and keep
renewing it so nobody else can get it.  They could also hit you with costly
lawsuits and try and persuade you that way I suppose.  Really though there
is no basis unless you have illegal content on there.

I heard well known author on the radio recently talking about how he had
just went to register his website name and found hisname.com was already
taken, by people looking to sell him the rights.  He chose hisname.org and
moved on.

Also I thought I heard recently that the internet council had recently
approved a couple of new extensions, in addition to edu, gov, com, and org
there was to be a few more. How about www.hawkwind.galaxy?

> I'm not saying HW doesn't have a right to hawkwind.com, mind you, I'm just
> wondering how much legal weight these arguments really have.
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