CK received a letter from a lawyer representing Flickr. The letter demands him to close the website and hand over the domain flickr.tw (zh) back to Yahoo! because it has violated the company's trademark. Many Taiwan bloggers criticized Yahoo! for its legal action. In Hemidemi's bookmark (zh), some comments point out that domain name shouldn't be equal to trademark; some point out that flickr wouldn't take up flickr.tw as its domain in the future, the website has done no harm to Yahoo!
1 comment
Why is this website even using the name Flickr in their domain name if they have no relationship with Flickr? Only Taiwanese could defend someone’s “right” to blatantly hijack a brand name. Yahoo wants to protect this name so that others don’t abuse it. There’s a very dodgy site called Yahoo-photos dot net. Seriously don’t go there! Apparently, they steal your yahoo ID and do all sorts of nasty things. I am not saying Flickr.tw is doing anything untoward but Yahoo is right to feel nervous about any website using “flickr” in its domain name.
So what if Yahoo won’t end up using the domain name? Many big sites like Google etc preemptively buy similar domain names to prevent just such a situation. It’s about protecting your users and protecting your good name on the net.