Hey: >From one of my law lists. George From: "John R. Levine" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg, N.Y. Subject: Re: [NET-LAWYERS] Domain Name Value To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >This is interesting; but I wonder why Altavista didn't have the domain >name sooner. I seem to recall using it before Yahoo started using it; >but maybe there was a "Digital" in the URL. > >THE WORD "ALTAVISTA" WORTH $3 MILLION This was a long and tangled case. The domain altavista.com was registered in February 1995, before Digital released their Altavista search engine in December 1995. For a while, altavista.com had a notice saying that they weren't the search engine, with a pointer to DEC's page. Then, presumably after getting tired of paying for all of the mistaken page hits, they changed their home page so that it displayed a search box that linked into DEC's search system. (This is technically easy to do.) Their page also had banner ads, before DEC's page did. Throughout this entire sequence of events, altavista.com always made it reasonably clear that they weren't DEC, and they did nothing whatsoever to encourage people looking for DEC to come to their page instead -- their traffic was essentially 100% due to typing errors. Now that DEC (well, Compaq) has ads on the real Altavista page, I expect that they'd rather capture back all of the ad revenue that altavista.com was getting, which explains the high price. Altavista (DEC's version) is one of the premier advertising sites on the net. Honestly, I can't blame Mr. Altavista. He registered a perfectly unexceptional domain name and it's hardly his fault that DEC chose an identical name and drove a lot of unwanted net traffic his way. -- John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 [EMAIL PROTECTED], Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail _________________________________________ Listowner: Lewis Rose, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives: http://eva.dc.lsoft.com/Archives/net-lawyers.html BNA invites you to try U.S. Law Week's Supreme Court Today web site of Supreme Court docket actions, full text opinions, oral argument summaries, and more. http://www.bna.com/newsstand for free 4-week trial. (Assistance: 1-800-452-7773, 202-452-4323) _______________________________________________________ George Matyjewicz, C.M.O. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] GAP Enterprises, Ltd. http://www.gapent.com/ Moderator of E-Tailer's Digest http://www.gapent.com/etailer/ Your Resource for Retail on the Net Moderator E-Marketing Digest http://www.webbers.com/emark/ Marketing Your Web http://www.gapent.com/myweb/ ____________________________________________________________________ -------------------------------------------------------------------- Join The Web Consultants Association : Register on our web site Now Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants If you lose the instructions All subscription/unsubscribing can be done directly from our website for all our lists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
