Air France Lawyers Holding Domain Name, AirFranceSucks.Com
By Aero-News Senior Correspondent, Kevin R.C. "Hognose"
O'Brien
Exercise for the
reader: go to the domain, www.airfrancesucks.com.
You get a notice, in French and English, from "Meyer and
Partners, Intellectual Property Lawyers," that they have reserved
the page on behalf of a client.
The unnamed client is, of course... Air France.
According to a complaint resolved before the World Intellectual
Property Organization earlier this year, "The Complainant is Societe Air France,
Roissy CDG Cedex, France, represented by Meyer & Partenaires,
France."
The haughty French
airline didn't, of course, set up its own "sucks" domain. But
neither did any Air France critic. The page apparently was set up
by domain speculators, who may have intended to sell it to such a
critic, or blackmail the airline with it. They never did sell it,
but pointed it at link-list sites, in a probable attempt to drive
traffic to sites with advertising benefiting the speculators.
Instead of dealing with the speculators, Air France took the
dispute to the corporate-friendly halls of WIPO. In a previous
dispute in 2001, WIPO failed to allow Lockheed Martin to
suppress "lockheedsucks.com" and
"lockheedmartinsucks.com," but since then WIPO has
more consistently taken positions critical of free speech and
hostile to corporate critics.
The WIPO now usually resolves domain disputes in favor of large
corporate litigants, and has awarded several other "...sucks"
domain names to the company criticized.
Acquiring negative
domain names to prevent their exploitation is nothing new. For
example, US civil rights groups have acquired several domain names
based on racial pejoratives or insults, to prevent actual racists
from deploying sites on those links.
Boston Mayor Thomas "Mumbles" Menino's minions bought up
armloads of domain names when they heard that Menino nemesis, local
columnist and talk show host Howie Carr was planning to put a
treasure trove of Menino malapropisms online. (They missed
mumblesmenino.us, where Carr shows off the inarticulate mayor at
his worst). Vegetarian radicals PETA took a domain name from a
spoof group, People Eating Tasty Animals. And corporations often
try to shut down critical sites: in our own industry, United
Airlines's many attacks on line-basher www.untied.com are
legendary. And now this.
The French, God bless 'em. They might not have St.-Exupery any
more.
They might not have the Concorde. But they have firm control of
airfrancesucks.com.
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'aviation.