Campaign Website Angers Beer Company
Sam Adams is a city commissioner in Portland Oregon, and he’s running for mayor. Unfortunately no one told the Boston Beer Company, brewers of Sam Adams beer. When they heard about Adams’ campaign site, samadamsformayor.com, they promptly served the mayoral candidate with a cease and desist letter claiming copyright infringement. The company claims they didn’t realize there was an actual person named Sam Adams running for mayor until after the letter was sent, and they have since backed off. The candidate hasn’t let the minor skirmish get to him, pointing out that even though the company claims to have held the copyright since 1984, he’s owned it since he was born. In case you were wondering, the Sam Adams of beer fame was a Revolutionary War patriot and brewer.
This case illustrates one of the problems with domain names and websites these days.
If a company names it’s service or product after someone, does that mean anyone with that name is out of luck when it comes to domain names? If companies like Sam Adams have their way, you bet!
Domain names are big business, spawning groups of folks called “Internet Squatters”. These folks snap up domains and then try to sell them for big bucks back to the people who really want them. For example, let’s say Pepsi has announced it’s coming out with a new lemon vanilla flavor. Squatters will snap up LemonVanilla.com, PepsiLemonVanilla.com, VanillaLemonPepsi.com, etc, and turn around and offer them to Pepsi for huge fees. There have been court cases against many of these squatters.
Another group is even more nefarious. They register misspellings of popular domains like Amazon and Yahoo and fill the sites with tons of ads in an attempt to take advantage of the misdirected traffic and Google’s AdSense program.
We’ll be talking more about domain names in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
websites, beer, Sam Adams, Portland Oregon, campaign sites
Leave a Reply