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Disputes Movies News Trademarks

Updates on Top 5 Fusible stories, May

US Navy SEALs coming out of the water

In May 2011, the United States Navy SEALs drew a lot of news coverage on the web following the killing of Osama bin Laden.  But the SEALs weren’t the only story on Fusible that attracted readers.  

Zynga hinted at plans of developing the next top iPhone game with the registration of hangmanwithfriends.com, the Navy won the battle over the SEAL Team 6 trademark and filed its own marks, Sony Pictures got rights to Kathryn Bigelow’s film about killing Osama bin Laden, former TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley sold The Inquisitr on Flippa for $330,000, and UberMedia gave up its domain claim on Twitteripad.com.

Hangman with Friends– There hasn’t been any news regarding Zynga’s plans for “Hangman with Friends”, other than the company registering the domain name hangmanwithfriends.com.  Considering one of the first word games kids learn to play is hangman, you can bet if Zynga does launch a hangman game on the iPad or iPhone, it could very well be the next top ranking iOS game.   

UberMedia and Twitter– After my story about UberMedia purchasing the domain name twitteripad.com was posted, the company deleted the domain from its portfolio.  The good news: the company avoided another possible trademark dispute with Twitter like the one it encountered over UberTwitter.  The bad news: someone in China registered the domain and is now redirecting users to a fake Apple survey page.  These types of websites often lead to scams or other problems for people, like computer viruses.  Either way, it looks like UberMedia made a smart play by dropping the name.  The company just raised another $5.6 million and its entire business revolves around Twitter.

The Inquistr — The Inquisitr (inquisitr.com) founded by former TechCrunch writer and b5media co-founder Duncan Riley in May 2008, sold for $330,000 USD on Flippa.   Two days after my story was published, The Inquisitr ran its own story “Duncan dishes on Inquisitr sale, future plans” that said the sale was complete and the site had changed hands.  “With everything said and done, Duncan has disclosed some facts and figures about the sale of the site. Final sale price was 10% over the reserve of $300,000, at $330,000. Keeping in with the threes trend, it went for 30x the monthly net after writers’ expenses” wrote Kim LaCapria. 

Navy’s SEAL Team trademark battle — I was the first to report (before any other news site or blog) that the Department of Navy filed a trademark for “SEAL Team” following Disney’s trademark filings on SEAL Team 6.  The story got immediately picked up by MediaPost who attributed their story here, but other major media outlets that reported on the news shortly thereafter, failed to give credit.  It can be frustrating as a blogger to see so many news sites and blogs not attribute the sources of their articles.  Ultimately, Disney abandoned their trademark filings.

Sony Pictures — Deadline.com reported that Sony Pictures Entertainment acquired the rights to Kathryn Bigelow’s film about killing Osama bin Laden.  Originally called “killing bin laden”, Kathryn Bigelow had apparently decided to change the film’s title.  Regardless, Sony Pictures registered nearly a dozen domain names including thekillingofbinladenmovie.com.  As of today, the film remains untitled, but the domain names have started forwarding to sonypictures.com.

Categories
News Video Games

EmpiresandAllies.com domain starts redirecting to Zynga’s Facebook game

Empires & Allies

I was thinking Zynga had missed another domain name opportunity with their newest combat strategy game Empires and Allies, but I guess I was wrong. 

Shortly after I published my story about the company announcing the launch of the game without the domain, the web address empiresandallies.com started redirecting to its page on Facebook.

Instead of establising a dedicated website like it has with Farmville.com and MafiaWars.com, it looks like the official home page for the game will be on Facebook. 

Search Engines

Others are looking to cash in by developing related keyword domains into websites and newsletters that offer tips and updates on the strategy game.  Empiresandalliesguide.info and empirealliesguide.com both rank on the first page of Google search engine results for the phrase “Empires & Allies”. 

Surprisingly, both domains were registered months ago in November 2010.

The owner of empirealliesguide.com was creating a history guide of sorts according to the first post, but that’s now changed with the launch of Zynga’s game.  The owner writes in his latest post, “Empires and Allies from Zynga has finally been released, and I’ve been playing it pretty much non-stop since the minute it came out (only with occasional bathroom breaks).  I’ve decided to start a FREE newsletter that will share tips and strategies for the game, as well as updates and notifications of any new guides that are released.”

The webmaster for empiresandalliesguide.info appears to have known about the Zynga game for awhile, but even without any official news put out by Zynga, the webmaster continued to post articles to ensure the site ranked well in the event the game did lauch.  It seems to have paid off, as the site ranks in the #1 spot even above the official Facebook page.

Categories
News Video Games

CallofDutyModernWarfare.com, doesn’t go to Activision after being released

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3

The owner of ModernWarfare3.com has managed to rack up nearly 7,000 “Likes” on Facebook for its unofficial fan site that looks a whole lot like the official MW3 site, but the bad news is most people Liking the page probably have no idea that the website is not an official Activision property. 

The fact is, Activision continues to blunder when it comes to domain names. 

Of course, the chore of registering domain names or getting them on the drop or aftermarket, is made all the more difficult by having the best video game franchise ever made and because there are plenty of people buying up every variation of the “Call of Duty” and “Modern Warfare” name.

The domain name callofdutymodernwarfare.com recently expired and was quickly scooped up by InTrust Domains on Thursday.

Domain: callofdutymodernwarfare.com

  Date Registered: 06/02/11
    Date Modified: 06/03/11
      Expiry Date: 06/02/12
                   DNS1: ns1.above.com
                   DNS2: ns2.above.com
  Registrant
                   InTrust Domains
                   Kenn Palm
                   11605 Meridian Market View                  
                   Falcon, CO (US)
                   80831
  Administrative Contact
                   InTrust Domains
                   Kenn Palm
                   11605 Meridian Market View                  
                   Falcon, CO (US)
                   80831

While Activision Publishing has never seemed all too interested in acquiring generic domains (bad news for owners of generics waiting for a big payday) or disputing domain names it missed out on (good news for squatters), it does own one of the best, callofduty.com. 

This week the company has been busy working on plans for its fall release of Call of Duty Elite, a premium online service for Call of Duty gamers. 

It’s also been registering domain names including callofduty-elite.org and callofduty-elite.net, according to DomainTools.

By the way, if you haven’t seen the Modern Warfare 3 trailer by The Onion — it has over 11 million views on YouTube.

Categories
News

Looks like Fiverr was the buyer of Fiver.com for $70,000

fiverr

No big surprise here, but it looks like the folks over at Fiverr, the popular website that lets people sell gigs for $5, are the new owners of fiver.com.

Though the domain remains behind WHOIS privacy at GoDaddy, it recently started forwarding to fiverr.com, and the domain name is hosted on the same IP address.

Back in late May, Sedo reported the sale of Fiver.com for $70,000, which led to obvious speculation that Fiverr acquired the domain name.  

Fiverr hasn’t garnered much attention in the news lately, and traffic to the site plummeted according to a rough estimate by Compete from 260,000 visitors in March 2011 to just 80,000 visitors a month later.

Considering the amount of traffic fiver.com was receiving before the acquisition (estimated in the thousands), it may have been just what Fiverr needed.

Categories
News Trademarks Video Games WIPO

Empires and Allies: Another missed domain name opportunity for Zynga?

Empires and Allies by Zynga

Zynga announced the launch of another game this week called Empires and Allies, its first combat strategy game which has more features than any other Zynga game to date. 

The company which is known for acquiring domain names on the aftermarket like Cityville.com and for buying never-before-registered domain names like HangmanwithFriends.com and FarmvilleExpress.com, may have another missed opportunity on its hands by failing to get the domain name EmpiresandAllies.com, a domain that was first registered in September 2010, along with the dotnet and dotorg versions of the name.

The company put out news on its blog about the launch of Empires and Allies, which included different links as to how to connect.  Play Empires & Allies at: http://www.zynga.com/empires, follow Empires & Allies on Twitter at @EmpiresAllies, or “Like” Empires & Allies on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/EmpiresAndAllies.

The missed opportunity

You’ll notice in the company’s announcement there’s no mention of a separate website address for the game. 

That’s because Zynga doesn’t appear to own the .com, .net, or .org domain names, which are currently sitting behind WHOIS privacy at GoDaddy. 

The .com doesn’t resolve at the time of this story, while the .net and .org are both parked at GoDaddy.  While it’s entirely possible Zynga may own the domains but hasn’t developed a website, all three names are registered to a yahoo address according to GoDaddy, not a Zynga address which is typically the case seen with Zynga’s domain names.

Could it be that an insider registered the domain names in the midst of development?

Zynga domains

Whether an insider registered the domains or not, Zynga is facing another problem on the web — most domain names are already taken.

A NamePros member yesterday posted a questionable message on the forum asking other members to appraise the .us version of the domain that they had purchased, noting in the post that the following domains were already registered:

empiresandallies.com
empiresandallies.info
empiresandallies.net
empiresandallies.org
empiresandallies.mobi
empiresandallies.us
empiresandallies.biz
empiresandallies.ca
empiresandallies.mx
empiresandallies.eu
empiresandallies.in
empiresanda…com.mx
empiresandallies.nl
empiresandallies.se

The member ends the post by saying, “By the way, Zynga doesn’t have the trademark yet, so Zynga can’t WIPO it due to Reverse Domain Hijacking laws.”

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. 

If you track the cases at WIPO, you’d know that Zynga has been successful.

Zynga files trademark

YOU READ IT HERE FIRST: Zynga filed a trademark for “Empires and Allies”. 

Not with the United States Patent and Trademark Office yet, but with the Trademark Office of the European Union.

Trade mark name : EMPIRES & ALLIES
Trade mark No : 010017028
Trade mark basis: CTM
Date of receipt : 02/06/2011
Number of results: 1 of 9

Name:  Zynga Inc.
ID No: 437897
Natural or legal person:  Legal entity
Address:  365 Vermont Street
Post code:  94103
Town:  San Francisco,
State: California
Country: UNITED STATES
Correspondence address:  Zynga Inc.  365 Vermont Street San Francisco, California 94103 ESTADOS UNIDOS (DE AMÉRICA)