I would suggest forcing compromise with such obvious asshats is not “moral” in any way.
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And for reform of the broken legal system. That a large publicly traded company behaved this reprehensibly comes as no surprise. The problem I and many have is with a legal system that allows bad actors with deep pockets to destroy those with limited resources through spurious litigation. A legal system that allows the rich to use it as a weapon against the rest of us is broken and needs reform.
Take, for example, coal CEO Robert Murray’s history of spurious litigation to silence critics. To highlight that injustice, John Oliver deliberately drew a target on himself knowing he’d be backed by the legal resources of HBO’s parent company Time Warner. That wasn’t David vs Goliath. But it was good vs evil.
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Yeah, I didn’t mean they would have had to lay people off to pay him; I was putting his deservingness of a massive payout in context.
Though, your point about the link between a company’s bank account and its employees’ is more relevant to companies gaining money. I suspect that when they lose money unexpectedly, payroll is one of the first places they look to make balancing savings.
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It excuses them a bit. They really want that domain and for a good reason. They seem to have offered good money in exchange for it, to no avail. So then they tried other, less favorable avenues. It’s still not nice of them, but the fault is mainly with the system that sticks the plaintiff with most of the bill even in easy and clear cut cases.
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If the government needs to bulldoze your house for a highway, they will just claim it via eminent domain. And they are not going to pay 10^6times your purchase price for it.
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Attention is a limited resource. If you were the god of URL and you had two formally identical claims for yamaha.com, one from the Yamaha company and one from a certain Mr. Yamaha Horie, manufacturer of craft lampshades - who do you think it would be more appropriate to grant it to?
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Who said anything about governments? I want your house.
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Datsun has been back for several years. There is an interesting history at the obvious website:
(I didn’t know, for example, that Datsun was originally DAT-son, meaning “son of DAT”.)
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If you give me $15 million for it, it’s yours.
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I’ll give you $200, otherwise I’ll spend millions to take you to court. It’s only fair.
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No you won’t. You’ll always be willing to pay at least projected lawsuit costs + reputation damage.
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…and? Sucks for Nissan Motors, web domain names are first come first served.
There is no “we’re a bigger company” exception that lets people swipe domain names that the owner doesn’t want to sell. Not unless the original owner’s clearly doing it to mislead people, which this man is not.
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So let’s get this straight…
If a wealthy person or company wants something that’s legitimately yours and you don’t want to sell it’s your fault if they ruin you just so long as they made a fair offer?
Booooooooooo.
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Yay, capitalism.
In the end, the lesson here is that justice is only as deep as your pockets.
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Odd phrasing there. All three points of sympathy are no doubt true - but given that I’d imagine you agree with the latter two of those points, why imply that our support is invalid because it also includes the first?
If you aren’t making that implication, then I’d say you were careless in your phrasing, and I’d expect better from a lawyer :-).
Agreed.
Strongly agreed. Given the spurious nature of the lawsuit, how did he not get his costs back?
Has 8080256256 indicated that he approved of Nissan’s actions or thought they were fair? Pointing out a mitigating factor (perhaps overall welfare would have been improved if Mr. Nissan had sold) is not the same as approval.
I, like most of us, expect that we would lay out a set of rules, guided by maximizing social welfare, and thus the “appropriate” party would be decided by the rules. We’d also realize that such rules aren’t always going to produce the socially ideal result.
But unless the social welfare costs are inordinately high, we live with the results. If the costs are too high, then we pass laws to expropriate. (I don’t think the cost of confused people seeking Nissan Motors does not pass this bar. Do you?)
Were the social cost even higher (lives lost), perhaps private action of a coercive nature might be called for (and I consider Nissan motors actions to be only mildly better than sending thugs to beat Mr. Nissan up), but the social cost is ridiculously far from that.
I think Nissan’s frustration is understandable, but legal does not equal ethical when choosing a course of action, and Nissan chose an unethical course of action. And part of the price of unethical behaviour is public shaming, as is occurring here.
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Barratry, but IANAL
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Here’s the deal. You give me 15 million now, and I leave you the domain name in my will - you can have it after I’m done with it.
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I love it when Internet arguments pan out like this.
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lawyer and time traveler, a regular Doctor Whom.
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I think what I’m arguing, at the core of it, is that water flows downhill. You can try to build and maintain a pond on a summit - but it’s obviously going to cost inordinate amounts of energy.
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