from the gimme-that,-it’s-mine! dept.
Back in the good old days, circa early ’97, on a Sunday morning not unlike this one, I got this weird phone call from some clown who claimed that by registering the lies.com domain name I had violated his trademark. Hilarity ensued. Read on for the full story, reprinted from the old, pre-Slash version of the site.

lies.com vs. CTT domain name dispute

A company called Creative Think Tank, Inc., is trying to use unfounded claims of trademark infringement to obtain this site’s domain name.

The facts of the dispute are pretty much laid out in the following correspondence:

1. CTT’s first letter
2. My response to CTT’s first letter
3. CTT’s second letter
4. My response to CTT’s second letter
5. CTT’s third letter
6. My response to CTT’s third letter

If you want to send comments to George Rafter, the president of CTT (actually, I suspect he’s the only employee), or to his lawyer, Richard M. Klein, here’s the contact information. No flames, please.

George Rafter
Creative Think Tank, Inc.
12540 Edgewater Dr.
Cleveland, OH 44107
(216) 521-3004

Richard M. Klein
Fay, Sharpe, Beall, Fagan, Minnich & McKee
1100 Superior Ave., Suite 700
Cleveland, OH 44114-2518
(216) 861-5582
E-mail: 6338200@mcimail.com

Postscript: So, I bet you’re wondering what eventually happened with all this. The answer is, I got to keep the domain. George Rafter sent me a scary-sounding email flame shortly after the correspondence above ended, but shortly after that he registered another domain to host his magazine, and shortly after that he decided that the Net wasn’t the get-rich-quick scheme he was looking for, so he let the domain lapse and moved on to bigger and better (or at least other) things. Meanwhile, I’m still here. Woo hoo!

John Callender
jbc@west.net

This entry was posted by jbc on Sunday, March 17th, 2002 at 6:15 am and is filed under lies.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.