It is said that the truth is a three edged sword… your version, my version, and the actual truth that lies somewhere in between. I’ve given up trying to be noble and speak the actual truth because inevitably, an arbitrator will settle somewhere in between and I’ll get screwed.
That being said, I introduce you to Uzi Nissan, a computer geek (hence I feel a kinship to his plight). He reserved the domain nissan.com back in the day when Hip-Hop was young… back when people were using Spry Mozaic to surf the few non-text web pages on the infant public internet, and websites didn’t use frames or tables for formatting (mainly because browsers didn’t support them yet, but I digress). Fast forward, Nissan Motor Corp has tried to sue this dude into oblivion to get their hands on the domain name.
You can check the nissan.com web site yourself, and decide if Uzi really did offer to sell the domain name for $15 Million, or if – as he claimed – after being pressed for a long time to sell, and having replied that the domain was not for sale, that he blurted out an absurd sum, knowing they wouldn’t go for it. He published the whole story here. Good to see that there is some sense of justice in the highest courts, but it didn’t come without a personal cost, as Uzi Nissan explains in this video.
This is reminiscent of another small company being stepped on by a big one who, figuring that the mountain of legal fees would make the little pest go away, uses its girth to get away with morally and ethically wrong behavior by manipulating the justice system. While in this case it was Micro$oft infringing on Eolas’ patent (and therefore small guy suing big, unlike Nissan’s situation) the underlying David vs. Goliath paradigm applies. Nice to see the little guy seems to be winning there too!
