Uzi Nissan Spent 8 Years Fighting Nissan Motor Company to Keep Nissan.com
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
The case went to the Federal Court of Justice (German: Bundesgerichtshof, BGH), the hightest court in the system of ordinary jurisdiction in Germany. Andres Shell lost and the reasoning was that the "First Come, First Served Principle" can be overruled by the "Priority Principle", which says that the better known party has priority.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19980204065557/http://www.shell....
So basically, the entity with the most money. Got it.
I'm impressed by many German things (note: firstborn American and all my ancestors are German), but not this.
The edge case is Deutsche Telekom and their sprawling claim on magenta, not this.
I would not want to live in a society where being rich gives you more rights, not just in practice, but in law, if that's in fact the case.
Further, I scoff at this concept of pragmatism. Life is more than pragmatics, pragmatism can easily become a synonym for cruelty, as it has in the past, whether that's consumer safety, government funded medical, animal welfare, or any other situation that was previously dictated by economic pragmatism, to the detriment humanity.
If you see 'apple.co.uk' do you think of iPhones and Macbooks, or do you think of "Hey Jude" and "Instant Karma"?
Why one and not the other?
Yeah, something is wrong with the US legal system. The case could have been dismissed at the outset. He owned the name; his was a computer company, theirs a car company.
Yes the US legal system is indeed messed up. Lots of Pyrrhic victories out there. Read about the USFL vs NFL case. The USFL actually won their anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL behemoth —- three dollars.
That one troubled me personally as that shut down the only professional American football team I rooted for as a kid :-/
Interesting fact: Donald Trump was a USFL team owner. I’m guessing he lost a lot of money on that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Football_Leagu...
To try and get a team, he bought a USFL team, and then pushed the USFL from the spring/summer to the fall/winter season and starting the lawsuit against the NFL, in the hopes that he could force a merger with the NFL.
I've always viewed him through that lens. The way other involved businessmen and the fans / people who cared about the general health of professional football as a whole (because they wanted to preserve a form of entertainment / ensure the future of pro football for whatever reason) view him. I've seen that same song and dance repeat ad nauseam in all sorts of different markets and situations he has his grimy hands in.
I think it is first mentioned in the Bible, the old testament, Nehemiah, Chapter 2:1
"And it came to pass in the month Nissan, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes
the king, that wine was before him: and I took up the wine, and gave it unto
the king. Now I had not been beforetime sad in his presence."
Genuinely curious if a familyname like "Nissan" would have been found among Jewish populations prior to the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language?
As far as I know it is an “old” name not a “refreshed” one.
According to [1] it was adopted as a first name in the Middle Ages, specifying the time a boy was born, and then became a family name (via A son of B).
In the past few hundred years, European Jews were generally forced to take fixed surnames. It's unlikely that Nissan was used as an actual surname at that point without any explicit patronymic. It's more likely that it was a father's first name, converted into a surname upon moving to Israel.
A lot of Afghans who have emigrated to foreign countries have created their own last names from something related to their family, geographical area/tribal affiliation, etc. There are also people who have not done this and their name printed on their passport is a double of their first name, so you have people named "Jawad Jawad".
Interestingly this issue seems to matter less and less as everyone I have observed goes to websites now via Google. So they don’t go to Nissan.com first, they Google Nissan and go to the first link. And NissanUSA.com is indeed the first non-ad link when I searched just now.
Won't make any difference to Nissan but that's about the best I can do.
Even Twitter or any social media clawing back a name should be disastrous for a website desiring people to use it.
My username on a social media site is often confused or assumed to be an Australian comedian and radio host. I'm waiting for the day my name is taken. I know I don't own the name or the site but it's poor service to do such a thing.
But if I'm called James Nissan, and I manage to register Nissan.com, then I shouldn't be forced to hand it over to Nissan the company. But they can buy it, sure.
If we really want to believe that justice is available to all, we need to push for universal legal insurance, something akin to Medicare, so that everyone can afford their day in court against a MegaCorp that's trying to muscle them out.
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=whi...
How can you own a single letter domain name but not your own brand. To add insult to injury they sold it for less than Facebook paid for fb.com.
In the end, Nissan Motor should own the domain and Uzi should have been fairly compensated - i.e. they should have paid him the $15 million he initially asked for.
And it cost them. I'm not on Nissan's side here. They should have engaged Uzi in a good-faith negotiation. In the end, I think he would have sold for something - because that would have been the right thing to do. Not only because it would have made financial sense for him to do so, but because the branding value of the domain is so high for a multi-national/multi-billion dollar corporation compared to a small mom and pop outfit that it approaches at least an ethical consideration. But they didn't do that, and all sides are worse for it.
A link to both nissancomputers.com and nissanusa.com could have been displayed there side by side along with their logos. Their sides could switch each day, to prevent any sort of prioritization.
Maintenance could be done by anyone. Changes on the index page could require consent of the both parties.
The index page could include a checkbox, or after-choice-prompt to allow the users to have their browsers automatically redirected to whichever site whenever they visit the nissan.com again. It would then be like nissan.com belongs to both of them, wouldn't it?
However, as I try taking this not-personal, and resolve this more logically than just sentimentally, it becomes really hard to make any sense of the fact that the domain nissan.com belongs a company that almost nobody knows (Nissan Computers), when a significant fraction of the human population would (falsely) assume that the domain belongs to another company (Nissan Motors) to which they might even try to reach by directly typing "www.nissan.com" on their browsers' address bar, without even searching for it on Google/Bing/whatever.
In the end, the fact that http://nissan.com/ points to somewhere else than Nissan Motors Company's (NMC) website is even detrimental against the overall experience of the Internet's users. Almost nobody heading to that website expects to see some place else than NMC's website. Even Uzi Nissan would be very much unhappy about it, if it was not a website visit, but a phone call. It is like a constant wrong-number situation.
They probably spent millions on attorney fees trying to acquire the domain -- pathetic.
> “Fifteen million dollars. Do you understand right now that I don’t want to sell?”
From the manner of speech, I think he said a random large amount, not that he had any intention to sell the domain.
What's the family business then meant to do, cease operating their family business under their generations-old family name?
None of that other stuff is relevant to domain name. The "Amazon" camping shop in Pikesville, Ky doesn't need to change its business name (though they probably should if they set up shop in Washington state).
> What's the family business then meant to do, cease operating their family business under their generations-old family name?
No, just take another domain name. Millions of people have probably landed on nissan.com while trying to research a car, and been confused and frustrated in disbelief. And this is because one guy with the name "Nissan" beat them to the punch in the early domain-name grab. He could have just as easily taken uzinissan.com and enjoyed his 11 hits a month on that domain.
Say that I am a mediocre violin player. But I happen to own a rare Stradivarius. A rich and successful violinist writes to me and asks to buy my violin. I refuse his offer. So he sues me, and says to the court that because he is so famous and so technically adept, the violin should rightfully belong to him. Is that fair?
So an already small company should change their domain, and potentially lose customers as a result, just because a larger company wants to use it?
> beat them to the punch in the early domain-name grab
That is to say he owns the domain. A third-party have a better use for it doesn't define ownership.
> He could have just as easily taken uzinissan.com
It was initially registered due to company names that contained "Nissan" -- registering using a full personal name doesn't make much sense in that case.
Utilitarian logic doesn't apply here.
There was a similar lawsuit in France over some lady named Milka who had milka.fr and she lost probably because she didn't have millions to blow on the lawsuit. They didn't bug me when I bought milka.eu (or something similar, it was a while ago) after reading the article and being drunk at the time decided it was a good idea to use it to host one of the wonderful pictures I took of a Lenin statue while in Budapest. Probably not worth the effort since it was pretty obvious I was just trolling them.
Nissan the company could have asked nicely before going in heavy with the lawsuit.
Instead of the lawsuit they could have played the long game and just bought the better URLs - nissan-cars.com, nissanUSA.com, nissan-usa.com, nissan-colorado.com, nissan-kentucky.com and just buried the problem that way.
In time the domain would come up for renewal, in time the owner might give up interest in owning it. In this instance, due to the surname, it is unlikely that the Mr Nissan would just give it up, but if Nissan the company really did not appear to be interested in the domain beyond a fair but reasonable price, what could Mr Nissan do about it?
By pretending he is in a David vs Goliath struggle for freedom and democracy, Mr Nissan has proven himself to be an idiot. He could look at his computer service offerings and laugh at how unmarketable his services are. Nobody would hire him except an old grandmother using a computer for the first time ever and needing help to plug in a mouse. By no stretch of the imagination does Mr Nissan offer goods/services that befit the marketplace.
Why is this?
Because he has decided to have his petty spat with the Nissan motor company. His website is an embarrassing folly.
Another aspect of the folly is ego. If you have a common name that can be confused with other things then you don't use it in the confusable form. 'nissan-computers.com' - as proposed by Nissan was generous, 'a-b-nissan-computers.com' with some initials at the front is fine. Or you use your street name, or your cat's name. In putting your customer first why would you present a confusing business name?