It seems that Warner Bros.

It seems that Warner Bros. has pulled the wool over our eyes when their spokesperson claimed their attempt to make Claire Field take down her Web site was totally incorrect. According to a press release from Claire’s solicitors (lawyers) and associated “press pack” which includes all letters sent to and from Warner Bros. lawyers, they think that the fact that she makes money on banner ads (which pay for her Web site hosting) means that she is using her harrypotterguide.co.uk domain name to make money in violation of Warner Bros. trademark. I’ve read the letters – and I suggest you do as well. It’s a good lesson about domain name disputes and trademark law.

In a previous post, I mentioned thar Warner Bros. had a legal obligation to establish intent for anyone making use of a trademark they owned. I also said that if Warner Bros. was going overboard in an attempt to squealch Harry Potter-related domain names, I would be sure to post something about it. Well, they certainly have in this case.

Warner Bros. has established this girl’s intent to run a non-profit fan site (with the exception of ad revenue strictly to pay for her Web site’s hosting). At this point their continued insistance for Claire to relinquish the domain is ridiculous – while there are no-fair use provisions within trademark law, I highly doubt a little girl running a fan site with a disclaimer will cause WB to loose their trademark. It certainly isn’t dilution or causing confusion over the mark – not when the first thing people will type when looking for Harry Potter stuff will be harrypotter[insert your TLD here] and WB already has all those registered from .com to .org to .co.uk. WB themselves claim they have no intent of censoring content and yet the first page of Claire’s site practically screams that it’s a fan site not affiliated with J.K. Rowling, Time Warner, or the publishers Bloomsbury and Scholastic. So why the unnecessary persistance?

This situation also begs the question of why Time Warner is going after Claire Field just as hard as they did the cybersquatter. Obviously they have to police each trademark issue the same or “risk losing it” but she’s a fan site for bloody sake – give her a break! She’s helping to publicize one of your license properties and despite the fact that Warner Bros. may not need such publicity, fan sites create the necessary stickiness needed to retain the community. Warner Bros. official Harry Potter site may have pretty pictures and cool sounds but a few AOL chat boards does not constitute community. The user interface to the boards and lack of streamlined messages makes it very difficult to get excited about the site when so many other fan sites do it hundreds of times better – why are you trying to kill that off?