After years of torment by callers and e-mailers trying to get in touch with the biggest name in search advertising, the owners of adsense.com give up and get themselves a new domain name. By Rachel Metz. read more
I'm confused, if she had the domain before Adsense was around, why didn't she sue for the copyright of the name "adsense"?
This is going to be VERY interesting. They got rid of it because it was costing them a lot of money to own the domain because they had to waste time fielding calls and information for Google. I don't know why they did not sell it to Google. The new, un-named buyer will NOT have the same rights to the domain that the current owner has, and Google will likely be able to get the domain after the sale, at least that is my prediction. I suspect someone is paying a pretty penny for it, but it is likely a big mistake. You can't buy the legacy rights for the domain unless you bought the entire company.
By merely buying the domain for $5 doesn't mean you own the trademark... And if you had read the article: AdSense referrals would have worked nicely...
You can not copyright a single word, you can only trademark short words or phrases and in this case you could not trademark adsense because it is two common words merged together. "Google AdSense" could be trademarked because "Google" is a made up word. Also, although she owned the domain AdSense.com prior to Google's launching of AdSense, she would not be able to use the domain to profit off of Google's advertising program. Google could not stop her from using the domain as long as she wasn't creating confusion with Google's product. It would have been helpful if she had developed the site prior to the launch of Google AdSense and kept the site's original focus as this would be considered prior art.
They've been around for quite some time: http://www.betterwhois.com/bwhois.cgi?verification=1112&domain=adsense.com http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.adsense.com
I would have used the domain to refer people to the adsense publishers network. You would thing she could have made more money from that alone than with her current business.
wow if she sell this domain she would get a minimum of $100,000, what if it was mine .adsense as said was estd. in 1995 there was no google adsense google might have thought to registered but was already taken
Google probably didn't want it because they figured if you can't figure out how to get to their site without typing in Adsense.com, you're too stupid to be one of their publishers. Then again, I've met some of Google's publishers...
Imagine how much money she could have made by using adsense.com to put up a "how-to" adsense site. She could have sold ebooks, used adsense or YPN, etc. and made an absolute killing! She definitely went about this the wrong way.