ThisDay, South Africa’s newest daily newspaper, is taking legal action against a website owner in the United Kingdom who it says has snatched its domain name, www.thisday.co.za. [WARNING: Contains explicit content].
Newshounds after the latest headlines from the website will probably get more than they bargained for — including a limousine with two escorts for hire, at R6 000.
The actual website address for the newspaper is now www.thisdaysa.co.za.
Graeme King, CEO of ThisDay media, told the Mail & Guardian Online on Tuesday that the alleged cyber-squatter had stolen their name and had tried to extort money from them.
‘He told the person who was trying to get the domain name for us, ‘If you pay me money I’ll release it to you’.
‘We told him we wouldn’t and then he said he’ll swap it [the domain] for ad space in the newspaper. He wanted R400 000-worth of space.
‘We left it, thinking he wouldn’t use the site, and that it was just a threat. Now they’ve actually gone ahead and we’re taking legal action to recover the site. He’s running an escort agency.”
King said it is ‘terrible” that people wanting to find their site wind up at the adult services website.
‘It’s [ThisDay] the natural name that springs to mind — it’s definitely harming us and we are hoping to recover the name.”
King said ThisDay is planning a ‘full interactive” website that he expects will be launched later in the year.
‘All we’ve got is a presence [on the web] and because of this turn of events we don’t want more than a presence right now.”
Acccording records on the co.za domain name administration website, the owner of the ThisDay site in dispute, Donald Waldron, appears to have registered the domain name about six months after ThisDay newspaper launched.
Speaking from his home outside London on Tuesday, Waldron told the M&G Online that he is ‘just playing” with the site at the moment and that it is not up and running properly yet.
Waldron, who used to live in South Africa, said it is ‘basically” a coincidence that his site is using the name of a South African daily newspaper.
He said he is holding the domain name, and that if someone else wants it they will have to ‘fight me here [the United Kingdom]”.
He said there has been a ‘rattling of spears” by people in South Africa, but said that ‘everything can be sorted out amicably sooner or later”.
Calvin Browne, a director at UniForum SA — an organisation that provides the infrastructure for people to register domain names — said of the 150 000 domain names in co.za, there are between 100 and 150 disputes.
He said that UniForum SA works on a ‘first come, first served” basis — the first person to send them a technically correct application form gets the name. But ‘there can only be one” domain name.
Browne said the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act of 2002 does provide for a conflict resolution process outside of the courts, but this process is not yet in place.
So, for ThisDay, it seems its only avenue of redress will be through the courts, and it will have to prove that Waldron is abusing a trademarked name that has been developed by the paper. If ThisDay wins the case, the court will probably instruct UniForum SA to declare the domain invalid and to reopen the registration process.
But then, the problem of domain name abuse is nothing new. Across Africa there are a number of cases in African countries, among them Nigeria and Mauritius, that are trying to retrieve their domain name. And you won’t be getting updates about the Bush family on Whitehouse.com.