Create, Consult, Control
News & commentary on intellectual property issues.
Mar212011 | Steve O'Donnell
Steveodonnell.com, now with fewer penises
About 10 years ago I attempted to register the domain steveodonnell.com and found that it was already taken. I was curious so I opened the site and to my great amusement and dismay, discovered that it was a gay porn gateway.
I, quite reasonably, wanted that domain for myself, so I looked up the registration information with a whois search and set a reminder to check the registration on its expiration date. Every time I checked, the domain registration was renewed by the same company and still contained a big image of the other Steve O’Donnell showing him in all of his <ahem> glory.
I registered the names of my two kids so they wouldn’t have to eventually deal with a similar issue (which I suggest everyone does).
Finally, this year I checked and the domain registration wasn’t renewed, but it was still in its initial redemption period so the original registrant could still renew. I looked into a number of domain “drop-catchers,” companies that buy and resell expired domains, but they seemed problematic--specifically, they tend to want a fee upfront to even try, and then if they do catch the domain, they auction it off to all bidders that paid for the initial catch attempt. In short, working with them wouldn’t guarantee that I would get the domain even though I paid their fees.
Instead, I simply emailed the administrative contact listed on the whois lookup and said that if they were going to let the domain expire anyway, that they should instead renew the registration for a year and then transfer it to me for what I thought was a reasonable amount. In that way, the original registrant received something rather than just letting the domain go and I was assured that I would become the new registrant.
The administrative contact accepted my offer and after a couple weeks of finalizing details, making payment, and waiting for the registrars to update the registration, I am now the proud owner of steveodonnell.com. Currently the URL simply forwards to this site, but I will probably repurpose it at some point. I doubt I’ll use it as my main business domain, since it might be blacklisted by some databases, and I’d hate to have someone try to find my legal practice and see that my site has been blocked for porn. The entire process was painless, fast, and relatively inexpensive--at least as compared to the uncertain process of using a drop-catcher.
So, how does my story interface with intellectual property? Obviously, I have some degree of IP rights to my name, but in this instance, where someone registered my name before I did, I probably couldn’t force a domain turnover. There are a few of us Steve O’Donnells. My one and only Twitter list is a list of people with the same name as me. We’re a diverse bunch. There are also some Steve O’Donnells of note, such as an actor, a writer, and an IT professional. It would be an insane mess if we all got into a fight over who had superior rights to the domain.
On the other hand, lets say that I’ve been doing business as “Steve’s Pizza” (not a great branding decision to use such a mark from a trademarking standpoint--but it’s just for illustration) and I find that another pizza place has already registered “stevespizza.com.” I probably won’t be able to force a domain turnover through the ICANN dispute process, but if the other Steve’s Pizza sells the domain to a competitor of mine, I’d be in a good position to dispute the competitor’s registration and force a turnover, especially if I was able to point to a registered trademark for Steve’s Pizza.
Certainly there are a lot of issues involved if someone has already registered a domain that you want, but there are ways of approaching the issue that can give someone an upper hand in negotiations or can even force a turnover. If you’re in such a situation, you should speak with a lawyer that understands the interplay of domain registration and trademark to create a plan to capture the domain.
If you're dying to see the previous version of steveodonnell.com you can find it on the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine.
Jul202009 | Steve O'Donnell
Monitoring your brand using a Yahoo Pipe
This is a slight diversion from my usual series of patent, copyright and trademark posts, but it's been said that variety is the spice of blogs. . . or something like that.
I'm a huge fan of RSS feeds. I use them to get a constant stream of information from my favorite blogs as well as keep me up to date on a number of sites that are updated often. Using them removes, or at least lessens, the possibility of me forgetting to check a site or missing a story that I would want to read.
Over the last year I've been spending time on Twitter. Apart from the social aspect of Twitter it is a constant, immediate news source. Granted, no great journalistic pieces are being tweeted in 140 characters, but for short breaking news, nothing beats it. . . yet. An aspect of this that relates back to my RSS affinity is that all the blogs or new sites that I follow either have their own Twitter presence or have fans that tweet links to their posts. Twitter also lets users grab an RSS feed for whatever searches they've run. For example, if I search Twitter for “patent” I can grab an RSS feed for those results and plug it into my RSS reader.
Yahoo pipes is a way of building custom RSS feeds from existing feeds, and tweaking the output. One of the things I use it to do is to monitor multiple Twitter searches, consolidate them, remove some irrelevant information and output a single RSS feed I monitor from my reader. There is quite a bit more than they can do and browsing those pipes listed on the site will demonstrate that. Here I'm going to demonstrate how to make my simple IP aggregator pipe which can be easily modified to monitor a brand name. A pipe customized to monitor a brand name will allow the user to search for mentions of the brand, or for mentions of competing brands, and identify potential customers as well as keep on top the chatter surrounding the brand name. Similarly, a Twitter search could also identify others using the same.
First, go to http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ You'll have to log in with your yahoo id and password, so I guess if you don't have those, this is really step 2, so go to yahoo, start an account and come back. Once you're logged in, click “create a pipe.”
Open a new browser tab and go to http://twitter.com and locate the search box on the right side of your home page. Type in your search and hit return. Now, go the bottom of the column containing the search field and click on “RSS feed for this query.” Copy the resulting URL. It should be something like “feed://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=[term]” where [term] is what you typed in the search field.
Go back to your yahoo pipes page, under the “Sources” menu on the left, click “Fetch Feed” and drag that to the grid [below, 1]. Now, we'll add the Twitter feed already in your clipboard by pasting it into the open field in the “Fetch Feed” module [below, 2]. You'll notice that the module “Pipe Output” was created automatically. We need to connect those two to see the output, so click on the circle at the bottom of the “Fetch Feed” module and drag to the circle on the top of the “Pipe Output” module [below, 3]. Down at the bottom of the screen is the debugging window where you can see the results of your pipe [below, 4]. Right now, it''s essentially just an RSS feed that's been renamed. Go back to your Twitter page and enter some more searches and copy/paste each one's RSS feed into another line in the “Fetch Feed” module.
At this point, I have three feeds coming into the pipe, all Twitter searches for the terms “patent,” “copyright,” and “trademark” which are being aggregated into a single feed. [below, 1] You might need to click “Refresh” in the debugging window to see changes. Save your pipe by clicking the “Save” button. [below, 2]
Now, you could stop right there and have a useful RSS feed that contains the results of multiple Twitter searches. If you click on “Back to My Pipes” [below. 3], then on the name of your newly created pipe, you'll be presented with a number of options on what to do with your pipe, such as posting to Google Reader, MyYahoo, or grabbing an RSS feed that you can use in other readers. There are also other options that should satisfy nearly any of your content needs.
Simply aggregating multiple feeds is useful, but there is still quite a bit of chatter on Twitter that we can filter out without losing relevant posts. To do that, I use “Filter” module under the “Operators” menu on the left of the pipe grid. [below, 1]In this filter I'm blocking posts that are ReTweets or responses, so I only see original posts. Also, shortly after first making this pipe I noticed a number of posts about “patent leather” that I didn't need, so I filtered out those. Then, when Michael Jackson died there was a huge spike in people tweeting about his patented dancing illusion so I added to my filter to block items mentioning him. To attach the “Filter” module to the pipe, move your mouse over one of the circles with a thread leading to another module and when the scissors icon appears, click it and then trade the new links. In my example, “Fetch Feed” gets linked to “Filter” which is linked to “Pipe Output.” [below, 2]
Now, I have a functional Twitter search aggregator that contains mostly relevant material. One very nice thing about the way this works is that once established, the output RSS feed stays the same, so I can go into this pipe and add searches or filter items without having to change any settings in my RSS reader. A similar pipe for a business monitoring it's brand might aggregate mentions of the brand itself along with common misspellings and the names of competitors. Keywords related to the business might also yield usable data, but maybe too much noise. If Twitter eventually adds geocoding data to tweets, a pipe can extract that data and limit results to a certain area, which would make keyword searches much more valuable to small to mid sized businesses.
This is really just a very small example of what Yahoo Pipes can do. Going back to the Yahoo Pipes home page will let explore how the modules work or let you look for public pipes that others have built. From there, you can save the pipes you like them under your profile and tinker with them.
Update: August 21, 2009, Twitter will soon be embedding location data in messages. Imagine the targeted campaigns this will make available to the small business person. If someone in your area mentions "restaurant," a savvy restauranteur will be able to reply to their message and optionally provide a link to a coupon. Someone in town mentions "wedding" and techie wedding photographers can reply with information about themselves; someone grumbles about their grass. . . well, you get the idea. Twitter is about to become a much more useful advertising medium.
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