FC: More on Volvo Cars vs. Volo Auto Museum, from Mike Masnick

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Previous Politech message:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-04838.html

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Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 16:11:10 -0700
To: dave () farber net, declan () well com
From: Mike Masnick <mike () techdirt com>
Subject: More on the Volo Auto Museum vs. Volvo Cars

Hi Dave, Declan,

I know both of you covered the story about Volvo vs. the Volo Car 
Museum.  Back when Dave first mentioned this story (in April: 
http://lists.elistx.com/archives/interesting-people/200304/msg00265.html), 
I wrote about it on Techdirt:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030425/0238253.shtml

and then promptly forgot about it.

I saw that Declan picked up the story last week:

http://www.politechbot.com/p-04830.html

Which led to increased attention on the story.  The folks over at Volvo 
sensed the increased interest, and must have gone searching for why, and 
somehow came up with my original post (above).

So, they suddenly wanted to talk to *me*, to explain their side of the 
story.  I don't know if they talked to either of you about it, but I spoke 
to the guy this morning, and he gave me Volvo's side of the story, which 
goes something like this:

(a) Volvo goes out to Volo Museum to check it out (he says it's pretty cool)
(b) Volo museum guy offers to sell Volvo the domain for quite a bit of money
(c) Volvo says they won't pay
(d) The two sides reach a friendly agreement, letting Volo keep the domain, 
but having him agree that he can't sell it to a Volvo competitor
(e) The folks at the Volo Museum change their mind the next day, and tell 
Volvo they want to milk this story for publicity.
(f) Volvo goes to WIPO to find out (from a third party perspective) who has 
more of a right to the name... but that was just for the ruling.  They 
claim they never actually "sued" for the domain and had no plans to 
actually go to court about it.

What I'm still confused about, though, is why Volvo still decided to bring 
the case to WIPO at all, which gave the museum all the ammunition they 
needed for the attention.  The guy at Volvo claimed it was "just so we had 
a ruling" on who owned the domain name.

Anyway, the other reason they must have decided to start doing this sort of 
damage control was because WIPO ruled this week that the museum gets to 
keep the name:  http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-volo20.html

I've written up a summary of all this at Techdirt as well: 
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030620/1536258_F.shtml

My feeling is that both sides are probably being mostly honest about this 
(with their own spin), and the auto museum did try to milk this for 
publicity, but, Volvo gave them all the ammo they needed by going to WIPO.

Mike 




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