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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Twitter don't mandate that you have to use your account for personal reasons only, as far as I know. How you use your account is up to you - that's one of Twitter's strengths... every person uses it in their own way.

I have no sympathy for domain squatters, but I have no sympathy for domain bullies either. the "Boston Celtics", whoever they are, have as little right to the username "celtics" as this guy. As such, he should probably keep it.

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In this case he was using the username "celtics" to provide updates about the Boston Celtics, with their logo as the page background.

If you'd grabbed "celtics.com" do you think you would have a legal right to it? What about McDonalds.com? Why is this different than general brand trademarks as they relate to domain names?

It seems to be a conflict if you're in the same "domain". i.e. If I grab @celtics and talk about Celtic language and culture, it shouldn't be a conflict. If I grab it to build a following about the team, I'm piggybacking on the effort/expense of them building that brand and deserve to have it yanked.

IMO, it's very similar to the Nissan.com case - the owner of that domain is named Nissan and has a business with that name. He got there first, and he's got rights. However, if it was some random guy who put up a splash page or a nissan car site, it's trademark infringement, no?

Did you pick McDonalds.com because of this?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds.html

Because that's the first thing that came to mind reading this complaint. That was back in the wild days of the Internet, when official company spokespeople could say:

  "Are you finding that the Internet is a 
   big thing?" asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful 
   McDonald's media-relations person, with
   whom I spoke a short while ago.

Same thing here. 18 months ago, Twitter's namespace was considered worthless. Now Twitter leads to live commentary on cable television, celebrities use it, and companies need a Twitter Strategy.

This is nothing like that since its not a publicly-available domain (with ties to the govt. no less), but a private username.

If I held a party at my house where I gave out unique nametags, the Celtics wouldn't have the right over the one that said "celtics" on it.

I guess I did mention the law, but that's not where I was going... But, yes, I know that Twitter has no legal obligation to any party. But if you agree that domain squatters should have to give up domain names to trademark holders, then the parallel holds.

then sell celtics their name for $10 million. Sounds like a good plan to me!

Or maybe twitter is the one selling the celtics their brand name for $10 million...

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