Saturday 10th June 2000
Ebony the Hamster reports on the recent court case

Julia Roberts, rumoured to be the highest paid actress in Hollywood, this week won a cybersuit against an American entrepreneur for registering the domain name www.juliaroberts.com.

Roberts, who's also amongst the top ten possessors of the biggest lips in Hollywood, felt that the registering of the name was an infringement of her personal rights and that, being her trademark, should only be used by herself. The court ruled that the actress had 'common law trademark rights in her name' and so awarded the use of the domain name solely to Ms Roberts and her associates.

The problem hits deep at the heart of domain names and is already raising serious questions and prompting heated debate around the globe amongst the cyber community. After all, Ms Roberts is unlikely to ever use the domain name for her own personal web site and has expressed no serious intention to do so - and the ruling leaves open the possibility that the actress may consider suing parents for naming their child 'Julia' and claim damages for taking a trademark and applying it to their own child.

It appears that the more famous one is, the more in control of other people's freewill one becomes - a trait already apparent in the political powers that have been elected.

Indeed, it seems almost incredulous that anyone who's not actively a participant of the world wide web should object to the goings on here when they have little or no first hand experience of what the community is all about. Though we would most heartily endorse any law suit which sued an organisation for taking such a domain name and demonizing the real person on it, the fact that the person concerned wants to stop someone from making money from a name which they themselves have made money with seems hardly fair and has also been reflected in the closure of numerous fan sites throughout the world by legal action.

Amongst those who've already recaptured their own domain name are Christian Dior and the Microsoft Corporation while there remains court cases pending by such rock stars as Tina Turner, Jethro Tull and Jimi Hendrix - the latter of which, as far as we knew, was dead. I guess it's quite something when a stiff can be given the right to prosecute a company when they're no longer a part of what's going on on planet earth. So far, we understand that the Creator hasn't sued the holders of www.god.co.uk, a uk-based search engine, but we've been receiving rumours that the Pope is considering formal proceedings.

Amazingly - to us hamsters at least - it's difficult to conceive of how a name given at birth can become a legal 'trademark' that's defensible in the open court. After all, the human media have often mentioned 'names' within their pages without the express permission of the person involved and one wonders whether these may now have to be handed over to be under the control of those people whose names they've used.

It's also strange that a collection of black symbols on white paper (or, in this case, some electrical impulses inside a server) could ever be considered to be a trademark and we anticipate people such as Ms Roberts suing ISPs throughout the world because the code 'juliaroberts' may, by chance, appear in the code of jpegs and gifs that reside on their webspace.

Recently, scholars working on extracting a Code from a religious work, published their findings that the name 'Julia' appeared repeatedly throughout their extensive investigations. While this had attempted to be swept under the carpet and kept quiet, we understand now that this may provide an opportunity for the actress to sue publishers of the religious work for a royalty of sales.

The Rodent Weekly has long since declined the opportunity to buy its own domain name (www.rodentweekly.com) and is quite open for anyone to take it upon themselves to purchase it for themselves. While we realise that mimicry may lead to misunderstanding, we'd take it as the highest of compliments that someone out there thought that we were famous enough to warrant their particular attention.

Ebony the Hamster writes for the Rodent Weekly.
This article appears courtesy of that paper.




Visit the official Hamster Presidential web site

Home page