Source: Reuters
By: Robert Evans
(GENEVA) — British authors Julian Barnes and Louis de Bernieres and French erotic film star turned singer Laure Sainclair have won control of Internet sites registered in their names, a United Nations (news – web sites) agency said Thursday.
Another case against alleged “cybersquatting” was won by British historian Antony Beevor.
The four were the latest cultural and entertainment personalities to complain successfully to the U.N.’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) over what they said were fraudulent Web sites.
WIPO has been running an arbitration service over the past year to adjudicate on cybersquatting — registration of sites by people or companies who have no connection with the names used but aim to sell them for profit.
Sites using any name can be set up and recorded with registrars around the world, on condition that their owners agree to accept arbitration rulings.
Barnes, author of bestsellers including “Love etc” and ”Cross-Channel,” and de Bernieres, best known for his World War Two love story “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,” brought their cases against a company in the British city of Birmingham.
Beevor, author of a best-selling account of the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, complained about the same company, Old Barn Studios Ltd.
In submissions to WIPO, all three alleged that behind the company was a Mark Hogarth — who last year was ordered by the agency to cede rights to a site he had registered in the name of another British writer, Jeanette Winterson.
Barnes and Beevor said the firm tried to sell them the sites and advertised them on the Internet, which Old Barn denied.
WIPO officials said Hogarth was believed to have registered a wide range of so-called top-level domain names, or Internet addresses, to which he had no obvious link and passed them on after having to cede jeanettewinterson.com to the writer.
Old Barn Studios insisted that it had bought sites bearing the names of Barnes, de Bernieres and Beevor legally.
But the WIPO arbitrators found that the writers had rights to their own names as trade or service marks and that the sites had been registered in bad faith.
They ordered that the sites be transferred to the three.
A WIPO arbitrator came to the same conclusion in the Sainclair case. She sought control of a lauresinclair.com site registered by a company called Visiotex S.A. in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but with a billing address in Tel Aviv.
The firm failed to submit any defense, WIPO said.
In her submission Sainclair, whose real name is Laurence Fontaine, said she had used her pseudonym for acting and singing since 1995.
In his finding, the arbitrator said he accepted that Sainclair was well known in France and Europe for her erotic films under the pseudonym and ordered the site to be transferred to her.
