] "It's a pretty big stretch for her to claim any ownership
] rights, since on the Internet those rights are only
] extended for commercial use," Internet law specialist
] John Dozier of the Virginia firm Dozier Internet Law.

If you take a company's name and register is as a personal domain name they can sue the piss out of you for it, but if a company takes your personal domain name and names a book or movie after it you have no recourse.

[ Interesting, and unfortunate, situation. It's not as simple as it seems. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. Isn't it the case that titles are never copyrightable, so at the very least the publisher has no legal argument against her. It seems, really, that she has a much greater right to the name than they, since she was using it, if not commercially, then at least in such a way that her reputation was tied into it. Almost seems like she should be able to tell the publisher/author to fuck off and pick another title. But i don't know. Is a domain name more like a title for your content when it's not actually a trademark? I'll have to think about this more.

In the end, it just sucks, since Jones effectively lost the domain, not b/c the publisher took it away, but because it's rendered useless for it's intended purpose. -k

p.s. no reflection on the author or her story, but it's not a great name for a book in the first place. ]

CNN.com - Owner of katie.com says she was victim, too -- of privacy invasion - Jul 27, 2004