[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia.ru & Wikimedia.de

[Daniel Mayer]

Erik wrote:
>Of course I should be allowed to start Erik's Garden 
>Olympics or to call my open source game "Mega Olympics".

Strawman. That's different Erik; you clearly are disambiguating the name from 
/the/ Olympics. Even your use examples might still be suspect, however.

This is not the same thing at all compared to Wikipedia.ru whose name is just 
Wikipedia.

>I am strongly morally opposed to using the UDRP process 
>to hijack domain names registered by others.

And what about the initial hijacking of our trademark to begin with? 

>Don't get me wrong: If we had a trademark on the 
>Wikipedia name, I would support going after those 
>who violate this trademark in their commercial  
>self-interest. But we don't. 

Sigh. It has already been stated /several/ times to you that we /do/ have a 
very clear trademark on the Wikipedia name. Registration is a secondary issue 
(as with copyrights). 

>I'm not saying we should do nothing. I am saying we 
>should ask them to hand over the name. If they don't 
>do it voluntarily, we should ask them for the price they 
>want.

I agree with this completely. However if they want an unreasonable price (IMO 
over 3 times what they paid to register the domain) then IMO we advance to 
the next level. 

We should also eventually register all Wikimedia trademarks starting with 
Wikimedia and Wikipedia. That way we will discourage cybersquatters in the 
future from automattically tripling (or greater) their money for each 
Wikimedia domain variant they purchase. Trademark registration will be a 
cheaper alternative, IMO. 

But the Wikipedia.ru case, IMO, is not a case of cybersquatting so we should 
treat this situation with kid gloves until and if the Wikipedia.ru people 
start to play hardball. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)