That Took Longer Than Two Weeks
One may recall from a bit more than two months back that Jeph Jacques — in what amounted to a private joke that twelve people would have ever noticed — registered the domain name walmart.horse¹, slapped a stupid picture² on the index page, and called it a day.
The Walmart corporation did not call it a day. As noted at the time, they sent Jacques a C&D and threatened him with dire consequences if he didn’t acquiesce to their demands to surrender ownership of walmart.horse within two weeks.
We learn today that they actually were preparing to take their claims of rightful ownership over walmart.horseto the World Internet Property Organization when Jacques decided he had more productive uses for his time than continuing to cause the Walmart corporation to continue to expend lawyerly time and effort over the fight for walmart.horse. It apparently never escalated to a hearing and today walmart.horse no longer displays the image of a horse in front of a Walmart. In fact, walmart.horse leads to an error page.
So well done, Walmart corporation — you absolutely didn’t spend dozens of hours by multiple lawyers on a trivial non-issue. And certainly anybody that searches for walmart.horse will never see the image of the horse in front of a Walmart anywhere except for here at Fleen, or at Ars Technica, Consumerist, The Guardian, Vice, Business Insider, The Daily News, or approximately (as of this writing) 11.9 million other places on the web.
As for Jacques? He doesn’t seem to be horribly broken up about the whole thing, possibly because he’s got Ryan North to commiserate with³, more likely because he’s getting ready to head to the Pacific Northwest for his special guest gig at VanCAF this weekend. We’ll talk about his fellow guests and exhibitors tomorrow. In the meantime, please enjoy this link to TaylorSwift.horse, and props to her for having a sense of humor about these things.
PS: walmart.horse
Spam of the day:
{ {I have|I’ve} been {surfing|browsing} online more than {three|3|2|4} hours today, yet I never founhd any interesting article like yours. {It’s|It is} pretty worth enough ffor me.
{In my opinion|Personally|In my view}, if all {webmasters|site owners|website owners|web owners} and bloggers made good content aas you did, the {internet|net|web} wikl be {much more|a lot more} usefyl than ever before.|
text omitted
{I am|I’m} {trying to|attempting to} find things to {improve|enhance} myy {website|site|web site}!I suppose its
ok to use {some of|a few of} your ideas!!\
I’m pretty sure that somewhere in the 2745 words/358 lines/8 pages that I cut out is a lengthy discourse on walmart.horse, but I’m not going to look for it.
_______________
¹ Which phrase is going to be repeated here a number of times, which may have the unfortunate effect of forever linking the phrase walmart.horse with the story of the walmart.horse domain name fight in Google aka the first draft of history.
² Of a horse in front of what appears to be a Walmart in Nova Scotia, judging from the flag.
³ As of this writing, walmart.horse.rip leads to a blank page but who knows how long before Walmart seeks to stamp it out as well.
I’m pretty sure that the botched spam today is almost as funny as walmart.horse (I am astonished that almost 12 hours later, no one has picked up walmart.horse.rip)
By rsty on 05.20.15 2:42 am
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