AOL wins rights to Aimster domain name
Register trademarks 'ster'

Matt Grinsteinner will rue the day that he ever sent the following email:

I've been reading the recent articles about AOL's 'AIM' suit and The Register trying to control all of the 'ster' names and was wondering this: What about www.aimster.com, or any domain name containing 'AIM' and 'STER'?

Who would get the rights to that? Would AOL since it's property comes first? Could a suit be filed between The Register and AOL for lawsuit rights? A lawsuit over the rights to file a lawsuit. Ain't this world great?

I'd like to see some quick write up that mocks the ability to copyright certain things, for instance Pat Riley copyrighting 'Three-peat'/'3peat' when the Chigaco bulls won 2 championships in a row and was aiming for thier third. Oh crap, I used the word 'aiming'. Damn - I suppose I'm going to have to pay the almighty AOL masters some sort of usage fee now. Oh crap, I did it again. I used the word 'masters'. I'm going to go broke typing this email...

Actually, it's worse than that. As of 2.00pm BST today, the Reg controls the following words: "a", "to", "all", "of", "some", "I", "we", "you", "they", "over" and "crap". We have also acquired a controlling interest in the lexicons of both Armenian and Uzbeck, as well as a minority shareholding in several obscure Romance dialects. Furthermore, we own "mattgrinsteinner.com" and all its variations, including .co.uk, .com.uk, .net, .org, .tv, .biz, etc. Accordingly, you will be billed $17,430.23 for use of registered vocabulary in your email. Furthermore, you will soon be contacted by a mate of ours from WIPO who will demand that you desist in using your own name in bad faith. We are pleased to offer you a new identity (for a modest fee) from our affiliate weruntheentireworldsojustshowusthemoney.com. Thankyou.

Now, what about this trademarking malarkey? Phil can see the the shadow of the Witchfinder General looming large over the whole thing:

You must be joking right, I sense cynism in your words but I gotta know, are you seriously backing the second largest "monopoly" on the planet! This kind of published media is the same thing that starts witch hunts. pretty soon I can see people being asked to drop coins into a can to use words like "the" and "and". Yeah maybe AOL does have a right to defend its intellectual property and of course its copywritten materials, but this is nothing but a giant buggering a little guy, BECAUSE IT CAN! I have a ton of colorful metaphors that I can use for AOL, but I will refrain for the sake of grace.

In my opinion AOL is a content provider for the technically lame, and has gotton rich off the ignorance of others, but this is a rip. Screw AOL and to the people who their screwing, My hopes and prayers are with them.

Oh dear, oh dear. We can feel a graphic coming on:

Yes, we all know what this means, don't we? Phil, you are advised to visit our partner senseofhumor.com, where - upon credit card payment of $999.99 - you can download a sense of humour. Do it now - you need it.