Daily Domainer

In these turbulent times, every company is out to protect their ostensibly good name. This practice extends onto the internet in the form of defensive registration, trademarks searches and, in the extreme, lawsuits. Any domainer is aware of this practice on the part of companies large and small. But what should a company do when the violating site and its author are backing your product and your name? Should pro-company sites be allowed to stand unaltered while those defaming a company are taken down? Somewhere in an ivory tower in picturesque Luxembourg, Skype is pondering that very question.

Jan Geirnaert, an IT consultant, is the author of Skype blogs Skype-Watch (Skype-Watch.com) and Skype-Gadgets (Skype-Gadgets.com). That is, he was the author of the two Skype blogs. Jan was also passionately pro-Skype. He aided marketing efforts for dozens of Skype–affiliated companies, briefed executives on the potential impact of Skype on their businesses, covered Skype-related news at international conferences and contributed to Skype Journal.

Then, Jan received a letter from Seema Sharma, an IP lawyer for Skype. Ms. Sharma was forwarded an email from Jan regarding his use of the Skype name in his decidedly pro-Skype blogging. She did what many IP lawyers would do. She pulled up her standard “cease and desist” letter, pasted his name and websites into it, and mailed it off.

This is not an entirely unexpected action on the part of any company’s legal staff. However, Jan took this to be a personal affront to his work in the trenches for the company, as his post here would indicate. So, Jan immediately took the letter to heart. He pulled all content from his blogs and posted the letter’s boilerplate legalese instead.

The news of Jan’s actions has made its way through the relatively small Skype-blogging community. Reactions vary from righteous indignation to the more understated “I think he over-reacted.” At Robert Scoble’s Scobleizer, the tone begins decidedly offended but later softens to a stance that, while Skype could have handled the situation better from a Public Relations standpoint, Jan’s immediate shutdown was probably also over the top. The comments, in general, echo this sentiment with some suggesting that a licensing arrangement could have been arranged for a trivial fee.

So, what do you think? Not only in this Skype case, but on the whole? If a domain owner is passionately working to promote a company’s name and product but is violating its trademark policy in the most literal sense, how should a company approach that person? Is there a possible win-win arrangement? If a blog is “under the wing” of a company, could you trust their opinion and should they divulge their arrangement?

Categories: Domain Disputes
Tags: skype