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Take-Two Interactive loses fight for Bioshock.com

Games giant Take-Two Interactive has lost an attempt to obtain the domain name Bioshock.com through arbitration proceedings from a company that owns hundreds of thousands of domain names. Take-Two is the developer behind the successful BioShock video game series. The first-person shooter game was announced in October 2004, two …

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Ginolard
Joke

They obvviously didn't say...

..."would you kindly give us the domain name rights?"

Anonymous Coward
Joke
Reply Icon

I'll fetch a golf-club

and we can sort out the domain squatters once and for all.

LawLessLessLaw
Boffin

Neat Trick

That's good planning.

Real Ale is Best
Boffin

And the moral of the story:

Buy the domain name before you announce the name of the product.

Simple, really.

Tigra 07
Pint

Not related

After winning that case he must feel very big, like hes the daddy or something ;-]

yoinkster
Troll

"demonstrates good faith"

I don't think it demonstrates good faith, quite the opposite. If they were kind enough to give Take-Two a domain that was very much to do with the game developer's business then surely it would follow that they would be considerate enough to hand over (or sell) the bioshock.com domain.

Instead what they did was manipulate how the judges would form their judgements. I bet they sat down and said something along the lines of "Look, if we pretend to give a rats and hand over taketwointeractive.com which isn't that big a deal, they'll then think we are happy hippies doing such wonderfully nice things and we can continue to make a fortune keeping a hold of bioshock.com mwahahaha"

Anonymous Coward
FAIL

title

the fact that the company is buying/registering domains for no other reason then to catch punters who just added ".com" at the end of a well known trademark is in itself a display of "bad faith."

Steven Knox
Boffin
Reply Icon

Except...

that they bought this domain well before the trademark was registered. In fact, they bought it well before the game was available, and only very shortly after the game was announced at all.

This was all mentioned in the article that you apparently skimmed over in your rush to judgment. It also mentioned that the content being served was not relevant to the video game -- which indicates that they're not trading on Take Two's trademark. It's possible they're instead (as also mentioned in the article) trading on the trade interests of the biomedical science companies which also use the term "bioshock", but that's beyond the scope of the dispute.

The real lesson here is that Take Two should have registered their trademark -- not to mention the domain -- before announcing the game to world+dog.

Anonymous Coward
WTF?
Reply Icon

@Steven Knox, 24th August 2010 13:16 GMT

I was making a remark on the *practice* of the company (and maybe others) who register domains to catch people.

for some who lecturing me about reading the article (which I did), perhaps you might wish to read my comment?

Gilbo

Astonishing

I came across this guy recently when a friend of mine was asking me for help finding the owner of a domain name that he wanted. Like this example, the name was a generic object and not a particular trademark.

One can argue that this chap has made a legitimate business from purchasing thousands of domain names containing everyday words that don't automatically fall under trademark or copyright... but if you really want to see into the mind of the man doing all this, go to NAmedia's homepage and read the guff on it.

Trust me, nothing will prepare you for the sheer amount of self-satisfied smug that's there.

Mike Hanna
Reply Icon

He is a muppet, isn't he?

"I can't create something on the internet that normal people will need. So what I've done is made myself a middle man, so that those people who are smart enough to have actual worthwhile ideas have to pay me money. And now I live on a tropical island. Aren't I great? Why would you not want to be like me?"

Cos you're a cock. It's probably quite a valid business plan, and he most likely makes his money from advertising, but he's got the attitude that means you'd never stop smashing the fire extinguisher into his head.

I have to admit though - I rarely type something into a titlebar and hope that it finds the right page. Do people still do that? Doesn't Googling things stop crap like this?

bobbles31

Hmmm Tricky

I would say that they are gambling on buying Domain Names now to use in bad faith in the future. Randomly registering domain names, the purpose of which is to allow people to search for a service/product/person, they are seeking on the internet with the intent that people will accidentally land on a page with only your adverts displayed is seeking to both gain from the proceeds of other peoples brand building AND deceiving the end user and profiting from it.

The advertising company is doing genuine URL owners a disservice by not allowing end users easy access to a URL that they would have expected to be there and doing the end user a disservice by forcing them to rethink their search to find what they were actually looking for.

Yorkshirepudding
Go

the great chain moves us all

must be some andrew ryan wannabe

Daniel B.
Coat

Cayman Islands

It's probably Ryan. Maybe Rapture is somewhere near Cayman Islands?

Mine's the one with the bathysphere key and the Big Daddy doll.

skelband
Stop

Serious question

I see this in papers and magazines as well:

Why are some pieces of quoted text in brackets?

Does it show some editorial modification?

Without the bracketed portions, the text makes no sense.

Neoc
Reply Icon

Re: Serious question

EL Reg is just following good editorial practice.

Whenever a small piece of text, or a quote, is -erm- quoted, it is considered "a good thing"(tm) to replace indefinite pronouns (like 'he', 'she', 'they', etc) with the actual names. Placing square brackets around them is the accepted way of showing that such a substitution occurred.

This is generally a good idea, especially when the text quoted is just a small part of a larger text and (without the larger picture) confusion might arise about which "they" is meant in a particular case.

Graham Marsden
Go
Reply Icon

@Serious question

The use of square brackets in this context generally means that the editor has included the name to replace eg "him" or "they" etc in a piece excerpted from a longer article.

eg "I see this in papers and magazines as well [Skelband asked] Why are some pieces of quoted text in brackets?"

Daniel B.
Reply Icon

English 101

[Bracketed] words are used when doing direct quotes to change words, or add extra words on a direct quote. This is done because usually the quote might refer to something that is not in the text, so you have to add that context for the quote to have any meaning at all. For example, you can have the following paragraph:

Andrew Ryan built Rapture as an Ayn Randian utopia. By 1960, it had been ravaged by civil war, while he remained locked down inside his own office.

If I want to do a direct quote from this, I would have to do it this way:

"By 1960, [Rapture] had been ravaged by civil war, [...]"

As you can see, I substituted it for Rapture.

Anonymous Coward
Boffin

Take Two is the publisher

The developer is Irrational Games who spun off of Looking Glass Studios, developed System Shock 2, were bought by 2K and renamed "2K Boston", and have now reverted to their original name for Bioshock Infinite.

Goat Jam
FAIL

Twit vs Twat

Take Two are Twits for announcing a game without ensuring they hold the rights to the fricking domain ferchrissake and the other guy is just a twat for what should be obvious reasons.

Tim Bates

Sucks to be them...

I loved Bioshock... Fantastic game I thought...

Bioshock 2 on the other hand leads me to think the company is retarded. They managed to release a PC game with a menu for setting controls, but failed to test it. They also let MS convince them GFWL is a good thing (it's not - especially for games then sold through Steam).

Failing to register a domain name before releasing the first game sounds right up their alley.

Henry Wertz 1

Conflicted...

On the one hand, he's certainly a cybersquatter. But, the arbitration board is right -- if Take Two didn't register a trademark, and he's not showing game ads on the page, he's not breaking any rules, and it's too bad for them.

Ariya

What do you call land owners who don't use their lands?

If you see a land for sale, try taking the owners of the land for Land Squatting? Take the case to court and see if you can win the case.

In the case of BioShock, the domain was registered 2 months before the trade mark was registered. There's no bad faith. Take Two just wanted to get the domain for free. Too bad. This is not even cybersquatting.

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