[thelist] Aimster must give up domain to AOL

Matt Patterson ltu97mp at reading.ac.uk
Mon May 21 13:54:34 CDT 2001


On 21/5/01 at 11:37 am, seth at sethbienek.com (Seth Bienek) wrote:

> AOL says that Aimster doesn't have the right to use it's copyrighted
> sequence of letters "AIM" in it's name, though the Aimster service
> isn't (as I understand it) even similar to the Instant Messenger
> product.
> 

>From what this <http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,38118,00.html> Wired
News article says, Aimster runs on top of AOL's Instant Messenger, so the
implication must be that the arbitration people think that Aimster is clearly
passing off on AOL, by implying some official link through the use of its
initials. 

I'm not sure I care much one way or the other, to be honest. AOL may well be the
spawn of the devil, but the morality of services which, despite claims to the
contrary, exist primarily to facilitate ripping people's work off is murky:

One's a monolithic capitalist entity, the other's a distributed capitalist
entity - Aimster are only in this to make money. I don't know what their
business model is, but someone's being taken for a ride somewhere: it relies on
people distributing items that other people paid to produce. Gnutella has the
best claim to a moral right to exist, in my opinion.  

Oh, and the record companies can f**k right off too.

Have I missed anyone?

Matt

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Matt Patterson:
   Student
   Reading University
   Department of Typography & Graphic Communication

   ltu97mp at reading.ac.uk
   
   http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~ltu97mp/

   'I just like to know,' said Pooh humbly. 'So as I can say to myself: 
   "I've got fourteen pots of honey left" or fifteen, as the case may be.
It's sort of comforting.'




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