cannabisnews.com: Don't Bogart That Domain!





Don't Bogart That Domain!
Posted by FoM on January 11, 1999 at 22:47:26 PT

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, smoking Marijuana can make "trivial events seem ... funny." Attorneys for search-engine giant Yahoo, however, are not amused by YaHooka, a colorful homegrown index of Marijuana-related sites that bears a superficial resemblance to its near-namesake. 
On 9 January, the creators of YaHooka received a sobering cease-and-desist letter from Yahoo counsel. The letter warned that if the unapologetically pro-pot site wasn't shut down by 12 January -- and the domain names yahooka.com and yahooka.net turned over to Yahoo -- the founders of YaHooka would face serious consequences, including a possible trademark infringement lawsuit and the payment of monetary damages. YaHooka spokesman Charles Alvison was bummed. "We haven't made a dime from YaHooka and never intended to," Alvison said from Oklahoma City. "We started the site to do something good, to show the different aspects of this issue.... Pot usage goes from college students to the corporate level, and we're making people more aware of it." The site, which draws 1,000 users a day, has caught on among the global cannabis community. The YaHooka index, updated daily, presents a range of weed-friendly URLs: from the bare-bones The Art of Making Bongs, to the online headquarters of the legally beleaguered Cannabis Cafe in British Columbia ("enjoy a taste of freedom"), to an impressive compendium of legalization resources from Norway to South Australia. YaHooka also boasts a Hall of Fame for herb champions in the public eye, buyer's club links, pot online postcard sites, a section on marijuana as medicine, and virtual smoke-filled chat rooms. It's enough to make a netsurfer inhale. Yahoo -- which is currently valued at US$40 billion -- refused to comment on its letter to YaHooka or to make any statement about domain-name disputes for this story. Another site, yahoo-sex.com, is reported to have received a cease-and-desist letter recently. A domain registered specifically because of its similarity to Yahoo -- yaho.com -- never received a cease-and-desist order, says domain-holder Timothy King. King and partner Rob Hoffer entered into a venture called Typo.Net, billing the firm as "the first World Wide Web URL spellchecker." Stoned or otherwise fumble-fingered typists who mistakenly entered "yaho.com" into their browsers were presented with a brief interstitial ad, and then redirected to Yahoo. Though the Typo.Net business model -- which included redirection of misaddressed email -- became perennial human-interest fodder for tech columns, it didn't fly. "We were never trying to hold these companies ransom, we were trying to provide a useful service," said King. "But nobody was interested." Tom Barrett, vice president of a company that markets a new trademark and domain-name search service called Namestake, says that the number of ongoing legal tussles over contested domains would indicate that "it's easier to prevent this stuff than dispute it." Barrett is hoping that companies will visit Namestake before choosing their own trademark and domain. A search for near-matches for Yahoo at Namestake reveals a substantial number of potential domain conflicts: 78 sites in the United States, and 83 internationally. And Yahoo's own index contains a compendium of Yahoo parody sites, several of which use derivative domain names -- JewHoo, for example, and Ya Hey -- and graphics and interface elements obviously inspired by the original site. YaHooka's Alvison says he never intended to create trademark confusion with the landmark search site. "We thought of the name in a marijuana chat room on IRC one night," he recalled. "There was a guy in there named Hooka, and so it was like, 'Yeah, Hooka!' The name just came together -- it wasn't a conscious decision." Alvison is looking for a lawyer who would be willing to defend the site's right to its domain pro bono. Because YaHooka takes a pro-drug use stance, the Net's most active and in-depth drug-law reform index, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, probably wouldn't link to it, says Karynn Fish, the DRC's director of programming. She still thinks YaHooka is a valuable online resource, however. "YaHooka provides another perspective on the war on drugs by those who are obviously affected by it," Fish said. 
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Comment #1 posted by Chad Rheaume on June 03, 1999 at 15:42:32 PT:
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Keep IT UP.This is a Free World. 
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