The CBC: Master of its own domains?
The CBC has served a British Columbian clothing manufacturer with a cease-and-desist order, after the designer, Michael Mills, continues to operate the web site HockeyFightInCanada.com and selling merchandise with a lookalike logo.
Mills told a reporter: “The CBC has parodies like the Royal Canadian Air Farce, so why can’t I do it?” (I guess it’s because the Air Farce isn’t selling products pretending to be the entities they parody.)
A letter sent on March 12 to Mills’ LocoBoy Clothing Co. demands he stop using the hockey fight logo, shut down the website, and surrender the domain name to the CBC.
All makes sense.
So why doesn’t the CBC own HockeyNightInCanada.com? Worse, whoever owns it is making direct money off it with Google ads.
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It’s totally possible that someone registered Hockynightincanada.com well before the CBC even knew what a domain name was. It’d be easy to say that the CBC was slow to understanding the web, but so were a lot of corporations at the time. Surprisingly, the Air Farce was one of the first CBC entities to embrace the web. They have a ton of variations on their name registered, and was one of the first sites to host video clips of the show.
I say “surprisingly” because you would normally never put “Air Farce” and “on the cutting edge of technology” in the same thought.
If the merchandising is the only thing about this that bothers the Ceeb, why are they after the website and the domain name?
“So why doesn’t the CBC own HockeyNightInCanada.com?” I presume, because they were too incompetent to grab it when the grabbing was good, and too weak to do anything about it now.
Heck, why didn’t Don Cherry snag this particular domain name first?