Nintendo Loses Complaint Against "wiiu.com" Owner

[Steven Bogos]

Nintendo Loses Complaint Against "wiiu.com" Owner

The World Intellectual Property Organization has ruled that wiiu.com will stay with its current owner.

Nintendo has lost a cybersquatting complaint filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization against the current owner of "wiiu.com." Now, if Nintendo wants the domain name, they will have to negotiate a price (and we're talking millions of dollars here) with its owner directly. Nintendo filled the complaint back in February, at which time an auction for the domain name was subsequently cancelled.

"Cybersquatting" is the act of purchasing a domain name of an intellectual property and "sitting" on it, with the intent of selling it back to the IP owner at an inflated price. Cybersquatting is actually against the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act in the United States, and there have been several high profile cases where squatters have had to relinquish their domain names to the IP holders without getting their big pay day.

PETA.com and whitehouse.com both secured their domain names through WIPO complaints, and even Nintendo secured rights to the supermario.com in 2011 via the organization. So why did Nintendo lose this time, especially considering that wiiu.com should be every bit a Nintendo property as supermario.com?

Well, it turns out wiiu.com was first registered back in 2004, when Nintendo hadn't even announced the original Wii yet. So how did the register know? Time travel? Leaked info from insiders? The answer is a lot less sinister. Back in the early boon of the internet, people rushed to purchase all of the four-letter domain names simply because they were short, it didn't matter that the letters didn't actually mean anything. The popular webcomic XKCD [http://www.xkcd.com] gets its name for this very reason.

So what we have is a case of one very, lucky individual who managed to randomly register the letters "WIIU" as a website, back before Nintendo actually announced the name, managing to slip past anticybersquatting laws and is probably in for the biggest payday of his life.

Source: Fusible [http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/case.jsp?case=D2013-0322]

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[Saulkar]

Quick! How much does it cost to register a four letter site?!

 

[Doom972]

Lucky guy.

Quick! How much does it cost to register a four letter site?!

They're all probably taken right now. If only we knew about it years ago.

 

[Infernal Lawyer]

Fuck! And the Nintendo fanboy in me was all ready to rage at this guy Oh well. Guess that lottery ticket he got nine years ago has finally paid off.

 

[wetfart]

I think we can all agree on this:

Congratulations you lucky lucky bastard.

 

[RedBackDragon]

ummmm .... add "nintendo" to it ??? nintendowiiu.com there you go

 

[Strazdas]

our loca torrent site has the ownership of the domain name which is the name of our head antipiracy group. hows that for cybersquatting? Though after some jugling they cant into agreement to put the site to remain empty only generating word "LANVA" which is the name of the organization. still they have to use different domain.
So people claimed that nintedo pattent trolls were unbeatable, but now we see otherwise. good day.

Fuck! And the Nintendo fanboy in me was all ready to rage at this guy Oh well. Guess that lottery ticket he got nine years ago has finally paid off.

Sorry, "Fuck" is already registered.

ummmm .... add "nintendo" to it ??? nintendowiiu.com there you go

Too long. WiiU user attention span is not long enough to type it all in.

 

[RedBackDragon]

our loca torrent site has the ownership of the domain name which is the name of our head antipiracy group. hows that for cybersquatting? Though after some jugling they cant into agreement to put the site to remain empty only generating word "LANVA" which is the name of the organization. still they have to use different domain.
So people claimed that nintedo pattent trolls were unbeatable, but now we see otherwise. good day.

Fuck! And the Nintendo fanboy in me was all ready to rage at this guy Oh well. Guess that lottery ticket he got nine years ago has finally paid off.

Sorry, "Fuck" is already registered.

ummmm .... add "nintendo" to it ??? nintendowiiu.com there you go

Too long. WiiU user attention span is not long enough to type it all in.

haha you may have a point there tongue in cheek but i am prety sure that escapeistmagizne.com has a few wiiU users in its ranks and thats just as long a name ... though even i must admit that if theyre smart enough to be here than they cant be all bad so my point may well be invalid >.>

 

[Strazdas]

haha you may have a point there tongue in cheek but i am prety sure that escapeistmagizne.com has a few wiiU users in its ranks and thats just as long a name ... though even i must admit that if theyre smart enough to be here than they cant be all bad so my point may well be invalid >.>

i was of course joking.
but seriuosly there were many times i typed in escapist.com instead, only to be dissapointed.

 

[Scars Unseen]

haha you may have a point there tongue in cheek but i am prety sure that escapeistmagizne.com has a few wiiU users in its ranks and thats just as long a name ... though even i must admit that if theyre smart enough to be here than they cant be all bad so my point may well be invalid >.>

i was of course joking.
but seriuosly there were many times i typed in escapist.com instead, only to be dissapointed.

I've done the same thing in Google site: searches. Usually followed by muttering "godammit" and typing the correct url.

 

[Strazdas]

haha you may have a point there tongue in cheek but i am prety sure that escapeistmagizne.com has a few wiiU users in its ranks and thats just as long a name ... though even i must admit that if theyre smart enough to be here than they cant be all bad so my point may well be invalid >.>

i was of course joking.
but seriuosly there were many times i typed in escapist.com instead, only to be dissapointed.

I've done the same thing in Google site: searches. Usually followed by muttering "godammit" and typing the correct url.

i usually just add "Escapist" at the end of my search and it shows the articles on escapist for the first 5 pages anyway.

 

[Terramax]

Registering 'Playstation7.com' as we speak....

Not sure to whom I should be siding with on this case. Both seem like the same kind of animal - the lazy, money-grabbing types to be exact.

Too long. WiiU user attention span is not long enough to type it all in.

BOOSH!

 

[Strazdas]

haha you may have a point there tongue in cheek but i am prety sure that escapeistmagizne.com has a few wiiU users in its ranks and thats just as long a name ... though even i must admit that if theyre smart enough to be here than they cant be all bad so my point may well be invalid >.>

i was of course joking.
but seriuosly there were many times i typed in escapist.com instead, only to be dissapointed.

I've done the same thing in Google site: searches. Usually followed by muttering "godammit" and typing the correct url.

i usually just add "Escapist" at the end of my search and it shows the articles on escapist for the first 5 pages anyway.

I have the site bookmarked. When I open my browser I just click on the top left thumbnail.

that yes, however i sometimes visit the site from computers that are not my own, so no bookmarks. and when searching for "That article i read last month" google search is still better than sites internal one.

 

[kailus13]

So that's why it's called xkcd. I always assumed it was some hyper-intelligent reason that I wouldn't understand.

Nintendo should have bought the website before they announced the name. They would have saved a lot of money that way.

 

[Something Amyss]

Too long. WiiU user attention span is not long enough to type it all in.

In fact, Wii U is too long. That's why sales are so bad.

 

[Aeshi]

So that's why it's called xkcd. I always assumed it was some hyper-intelligent reason that I wouldn't understand.

Nintendo should have bought the website before they announced the name. They would have saved a lot of money that way.

I could've sworn Xkcd's name had something to do with Scrabble (X,K,C&D being (some of) the most valuable letters or something?)

 

[MrPhyntch]

ummmm .... add "nintendo" to it ??? nintendowiiu.com there you go

It has less to do with wanting a website for their console (they already have Nintendo.com for everything anyway) and mroe to do with stupid internet users and housewives hearing about this thing called a "Wii U" and assuming that, like everything else, its website is "WiiU.com". Essentially Nintendo wants to pick up the traffic that will be going over to that guy.

haha you may have a point there tongue in cheek but i am prety sure that escapeistmagizne.com has a few wiiU users in its ranks and thats just as long a name ... though even i must admit that if theyre smart enough to be here than they cant be all bad so my point may well be invalid >.>

I just type in "es" and Chrome autofills for me. So beat that.

And yes, I need the "s" too, I go to explosm pretty often too.

So that's why it's called xkcd. I always assumed it was some hyper-intelligent reason that I wouldn't understand.

Nintendo should have bought the website before they announced the name. They would have saved a lot of money that way.

I could've sworn Xkcd's name had something to do with Scrabble (X,K,C&D being (some of) the most valuable letters or something?)

And I could've sworn that xkcd was his old username back in the early days of the internet, and that is was a form of troll, because it was incredibly easy to type, but impossible to pronounce, forcing the other people to speak it really long and awkwardly, but type it really short and easily.

 

[Hero of Lime]

I'm really curious to see what back then the term Wii U was even used for(unless it was registered purely at random), if it was right after the Wii was announced to be the name, this would make sense, but for once Nintendo doesn't have much of a case, ah well.

Too long. WiiU user attention span is not long enough to type it all in.

Well that wasn't very nice. ;__;

Wait, what am I crying about?