Hacker News Reader

Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

He was even willing to sell it for €5,000. If they had just paid that relatively small sum instead of getting all triggered that someone might ask money they would have had the domain. Hilarious. Good on this Christian fella for winning. What a bunch of idiots.

This does bring up a question though; I've had arp242.net for a long time, and obviously that's not my actual name. Can some company register "arp242" as a trademark and hijack my domain?

View on HN

I think they generally give a lot of weight to someone who registered the domain well ahead of the said company registering their mark. Though you might run into trouble if you started using the domain in bad-faith against that company (ex. impersonating them).

In your example, you had that domain well in advance, it's your self-identified pseudonym that predates said mark, and it's actively being used to host your personal website. That seems like a pretty strong defense.

For the record, common law generally doesn't have a solid concept of actual/legal/"real" name, if you're known by a name then it's your name.

My birth cert, bank accounts, passports etc. are issued in various jurisdictions with various names. I'm not an international man of mystery or tax cheat, but I'm known by various equally legitimate names. It is a bit of a bother when someone around they must all be identical, but there's no crime or deception.

That is perhaps true in some Common Law jurisdictions (US?), but not for much of the world, including some Common Law jurisdiction such as the UK and Ireland. The first name I use daily is different from what's on my passport and I've gotten into trouble with this in both the UK and Ireland.

I'm not sure on what we disagree. It is my understanding that what I said applies to the UK and Ireland, there are formal ways to register a name change, but it is not necessary and it is possible to "change" your name simply by having people refer to you using the new name.

As I mentioned, this will cause some difficulty with people and organisations who assume names are unique and immutable(c.f. [0]), but that's not a legal issue and is no different to someone not coping with any other unusual but allowable circumstance.

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

> there are formal ways to register a name change, but it is not necessary and it is possible to "change" your name simply by having people refer to you using the new name.

Try opening a bank account like that. I can guarantee you it's not going to work; they will want to see a passport and proof of address with exactly the same name. I've been rejected by banks just because the utility bill shortened my second middle name to just "P".

This seems true for pretty anything of substance: government, tax, banks, insurance, health care, things like that. I'm not a lawyer and don't know how it works according to the letter of the law, but de-facto, you will have a "legal name".

I'm sorry you had trouble from your bank, I know the requirements are annoying. I have indeed opened bank accounts including in the UK and Ireland in names other than my passport name. It's easier once you have some piece of paper with a new name on it to get another.

>He was even willing to sell it for €5,000.

so he didn't much care about it as his email address as he generally used his other domain christian-scipio.de? https://www.christian-scipio.de/contact

It sounds like they intended to use it as the primary e-mail domain for himself and family. They claimed that they had already switched to using it.

However, the total window of time here is small. They registered the domain in late November 2023 and this UDRP was filed in late February 2024. It also sounds like initial contact to try to acquire the domain occurred in early December 2023... so only a couple days after it was registered.

They can try through the UDRP, but your easy defense is to point that the date registered exceeds their TM by years. The UDRP would be highly likely to end in your favor should you dispute.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com