Sour Grapes
Of course we're Fair and Balanced!

2004-08-05

The hijacking of katie.com



Steve Sapovits alerted me to a story in a message to an e-mail list I'm on:




A girl named Katie Tarbox becomes a victim of an internet predator when she's 13. She writes a book about it in 2000. Putnam, the publisher, titles it 'katie.com'. But katie.com is a domain already owned by a Katie Jones, given to her as a gift by her husband. Her site gets buried with traffic, she has to take down her content, and now Tarbox's lawyer is demanding that the domain be turned over.



There's so much I dislike about this....




Same here, Steve. Not only the pedophilia, but also one of the most egregious of big-company domain name bullying — under the guise of so-call intellectual property rights — that I've heard of.



That's it in a nutshell, but more detail (including the fact that the publisher seemed to know full well what it was doing well before the fact) is available at The Register, among other places.



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