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‘Hero’ loses Dixons domain battle

WIPO rules against protest site

A self-proclaimed hero has lost his domain name battle with Dixons over a protest Web site.

WIPO decided that dixons-online.net and dixons-online.org, owned by student Abu Abdullaah, were 'confusingly similar' to Dixons' trademark, and were registered in bad faith.

Last month it ruled that both URLs should be transferred to Dixons.

These are not the first domain names fought over by the two parties. Earlier this year Dixons got its knickers in at twist over dixons-online.co.uk, and went crying to Nominet (which handles domain disputes in the UK). Again, it was handed the domain.

The owner of these corners of cyberspace is non too pleased by this outcome - especially as the URLs were being used for a protest site against Dixons' customer service.

Abdullaah, who uses the email address prefix of 'Iamahero', still runs the complaints project, but now from dixonscustomers.com - an URL as yet unwanted by Dixons.

Abdullaah denies being a cybersquatter. He feels that the sites, which have collectively racked up more than 70,000 hits, in no way claim to be associated with the high street retail giant. He also said that Dixons should be big enough to welcome criticism.

Unfortunately for Dixons, which claims to be "all for freedom of expression", it isn't. ®

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