[Random-bits] Dale Buss: Weber Gets Grilled

[James Love]

This is a trademark dispute involving Weber barecue grills.
The small business won an ICANN/WIPO panel decision. 

Jamie

http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,18484,00.html

September 18, 2000 


	Weber Gets Grilled 

	A family-owned hardware store remains the 
	premier online dealer of Weber barbecue 
	equipment, even as it faces challenges from 
	the grillmaker. 

By Dale Buss

Brian O'Donnell's e-mail handle is "grillmaster." His family's
hardware store was the Weber grill national dealer of the year
in 1996. In addition to courting customers with a spiffy Weber
grill showroom, the business annually sells about $1 million
worth of Weber-related products online.

The guy may love Weber grills, but Weber-Stephen Co., the
Tiffany of barbecues, doesn't like him. Earlier this year the
company sued him in federal court in Chicago and filed a claim
before the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva
that could have smothered his lucrative e-commerce
operation.

The bone of contention is that www.webergrill.com is
O'Donnell's Web site, and Weber-Stephen wanted it for itself.

It's another in the hundreds of cases in which a big company
is fighting someone who has registered its corporate brand as
a domain name on the Internet. In the vast majority of cases,
the big guy wins. But not this time.

Last month Weber withdrew the lawsuit in the wake of a WIPO
arbitrator's denial of Weber's complaint. "[Weber] argued that
we were cybersquatters, which we're not," says the
38-year-old O'Donnell, whose father opened their store in
the well-to- do Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago in
1941. "We just used the URL as a different way to market the
product - like putting up a sign in our window saying, 'Weber
grills.'"
    
   [snip]


-- 
James Love, Consumer Project on Technology
v. 1.202.387.8030, fax 1.202.234.5176
love@cptech.org, http://www.cptech.org