Previous Politech message: http://www.politechbot.com/p-04838.html --- Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 16:11:10 -0700 To: daveat_private, declanat_private From: Mike Masnick <mikeat_private> Subject: More on the Volo Auto Museum vs. Volvo Cars Hi Dave, Declan, I know both of you covered the story about Volvo vs. the Volo Car Museum. Back when Dave first mentioned this story (in April: http://lists.elistx.com/archives/interesting-people/200304/msg00265.html), I wrote about it on Techdirt: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030425/0238253.shtml and then promptly forgot about it. I saw that Declan picked up the story last week: http://www.politechbot.com/p-04830.html Which led to increased attention on the story. The folks over at Volvo sensed the increased interest, and must have gone searching for why, and somehow came up with my original post (above). So, they suddenly wanted to talk to *me*, to explain their side of the story. I don't know if they talked to either of you about it, but I spoke to the guy this morning, and he gave me Volvo's side of the story, which goes something like this: (a) Volvo goes out to Volo Museum to check it out (he says it's pretty cool) (b) Volo museum guy offers to sell Volvo the domain for quite a bit of money (c) Volvo says they won't pay (d) The two sides reach a friendly agreement, letting Volo keep the domain, but having him agree that he can't sell it to a Volvo competitor (e) The folks at the Volo Museum change their mind the next day, and tell Volvo they want to milk this story for publicity. (f) Volvo goes to WIPO to find out (from a third party perspective) who has more of a right to the name... but that was just for the ruling. They claim they never actually "sued" for the domain and had no plans to actually go to court about it. What I'm still confused about, though, is why Volvo still decided to bring the case to WIPO at all, which gave the museum all the ammunition they needed for the attention. The guy at Volvo claimed it was "just so we had a ruling" on who owned the domain name. Anyway, the other reason they must have decided to start doing this sort of damage control was because WIPO ruled this week that the museum gets to keep the name: http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-volo20.html I've written up a summary of all this at Techdirt as well: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030620/1536258_F.shtml My feeling is that both sides are probably being mostly honest about this (with their own spin), and the auto museum did try to milk this for publicity, but, Volvo gave them all the ammo they needed by going to WIPO. Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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