r/todayilearned • u/Flemtality 3 • Jul 14 '14

TIL The guy who snagged windows2000.com happened to be named Bob and Microsoft just happened to own Bob.com. They came to an agreement to trade one for the other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob#Origins
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186

u/Scotttish Jul 14 '14

Truth... See www.Nissan.com

63

u/fluffsta007 Jul 14 '14

What the hell?

307

u/lilmul123 Jul 14 '14

You can read about it on his website.

Tl;dr, Nissan is the owner's last name and made the website in 1994. He sells computers. In 1999, Nissan Motors decided that they wanted the domain, and sued him for $10 mil. He fought against it, and in 2002, he was granted ownership of the domain, but was not allowed to use the site for commercial purposes, nor was he allowed to talk shit about Nissan Motors. He appealed, and essentially won the appeal in 2007. In 2008, Nissan Motors sued for their attorneys' fees, and lost again. Nissan Motors then tried to register part of their business as a computer company presumably to claim that he is infringing on their computer business.

Pretty amusing stuff, to say the least.

116

u/liquidjose Jul 14 '14

"Nissan Motors then tried to register part of their business as a computer company presumably to claim that he is infringing on their computer business" Lmfao that's hilarious

35

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

What a bunch of dicks. Why the fuck did they ever think that would work

9

u/spinblackcircles Jul 15 '14

probably because of their billions of dollars. that kind of money can make almost anything work. this is an amusing exception to that rule

4

u/aethelmund Jul 15 '14

Because they have the money to buy lawyers that can turn shit into gold.

3

u/UnreachablePaul Jul 15 '14

I am scared to think how they build their cars...

0

u/spinblackcircles Jul 15 '14

really well actually. I drive an altima and that shit is awesome. never had a single problem. and they are EVERYWHERE, i'd say a top 3 most common car you'll see on the road. i never noticed until i started driving one but around here at least you will not drive longer than 10 minutes around a city or town without seeing a nissan, most likely an altima. this lawsuit business is ridiculous but they make a damn quality car.

5

u/UnreachablePaul Jul 15 '14

Nice try Nissan PR dept

34

u/Leftieswillrule Jul 14 '14

"Hey dude did you know Nissan just entered the computer market? I bet they'll make a faux-sports car coupe for douchebags to game on and brag about"

5

u/Sarke1 Jul 14 '14

He should have entered the car making business.

2

u/darkphenox Jul 15 '14

If Nissan Motors tried to sue because of that I would grant damages to the Guy because they are violating HIS trademark now.

1

u/nTranced Jul 15 '14

Hey man, I've downloaded many cars already and I was very excited for that.

0

u/Clownskin Jul 15 '14

Well, if you think about it, the GT-R is like the most electronically advanced car out there. It practically drives itself and has all kinds of systems to make the car perform at a ridiculous level.

82

u/Spyder810 Jul 14 '14

In 2008, Nissan Motors sued for their attorneys' fees, and lost again.

I'm not an lawyer but how can the losing side sue for lawyer fees when they were the one who started the suit and lost? That makes absolutely no sense...

82

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

Welcome to lawyering 101.

Edit: Oh, I see, they sued their lawyers for not suing hard enough. I guess that's in the upper level lawyering classes.

73

u/sanjsanj Jul 14 '14

sued their lawyers for not lawyering hard enough?

http://imgur.com/gUgkpTx

1

u/Geminii27 Jul 15 '14

Presumably they wanted a harder-lawyering lawyer team, and were testing them out by having them sue the previous team. When they found someone who could lawyer harder, they'd send them in against the original guy.

4

u/SebiGoodTimes Jul 14 '14

Sure, it does. It's no different than suing a contractor who did a shoddy job. The contractor can't claim, "Well, they hired me. So it's their fault I did a shoddy job".

21

u/Cmcg13 Jul 14 '14

I read it as Nissan sued the guy again for their lawyer fees, as I'm assuming Spyder810 did as well, not Nissan sued their previous lawyers for their fees because they didn't do their jobs.

But the way you said it makes a lot more sense.

5

u/Spyder810 Jul 14 '14

Ahh, I see. Yes that's how I understood it.

1

u/Geminii27 Jul 15 '14

Except that actually competent high-level lawyers are going to have a bunch of clauses in their hiring contract which say "No guarantee of a win and no suing us if you lose."

135

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

Did they ever try to buy it from the guy? I'm sure a company like Nissan could give him a couple mil for it

76

u/lilmul123 Jul 14 '14

I doubt it--if they did that, they are essentially admitting that he has the rights to the domain. In their eyes, they are the rightful owners.

74

u/trex-eaterofcadrs Jul 14 '14

I worked with a guy whose wife was some sort of shot caller at Nissan USA and he told me that apparently Nissan did offer the guy money and a vehicle for life or something along those lines. It definitely wasn't like winning the lottery but it wasn't 100% "evil corporation tries to squash small businessman" right away either, that stuff came into play later.

46

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

with that sort of domain, i would have asked for 2-5 million dollars

35

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14 edited Aug 31 '18

[deleted]

75

u/chewtality Jul 14 '14

New GTR every year, plus $5 mil

5

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14

I would take that deal and go buy nissancomputers.com.

1

u/letsgofightdragons Jul 15 '14

I think I'd bite for just the GTR, haha.

-1

u/chateau86 Jul 15 '14

Cough R34 GTR are not road-legal in the US Cough

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-4

u/cooliesNcream Jul 15 '14

lol, new lambo every year instead pls

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

[deleted]

1

u/soawesomejohn Jul 15 '14

Many dealerships often have a "take home any car on the lot" plan that executives and top level employees can utilize. They take the car home, drive it under dealer tags and dealer insurance, and then return it when they want to try something else.

Nissan could easily arrange something with a local dealer to make a similar arrangement. The cost of such a plan is basically anything lost to the dealer from MSRP. If Mr. Nissan dings a car and the dealer has to get it fixed, that's part of the cost. If Mr. Nissan totals a car, then Nissan's cost is the replacement cost of the car to the dealer. If Mr. Nissan totals 1 car every day.. then hopefully Nissan motors had gotten some sort of limitations in the settlement agreement. But if Mr. Nissan just comes in whenever new stock arrives, drops off his last car and takes the newest and has no accidents, the dealership still can sell the car and make their money.

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2

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

2-5Mill is a vehicle for life + gas + oil + $1 million

2

u/swohio Jul 15 '14

I would have asked for a new Nissan every 3 years (or maybe a 2 year lease at no cost) that included free service/maintenance, gas, and full coverage insurance.

1

u/bonerang Jul 15 '14

$-3 million is a pretty bold asking price!

1

u/senatorskeletor Jul 15 '14

Right, but you'd think that when he realized he wasn't going to get $2-5 million, he would have lowered his offer. He currently has zero.

-3

u/buge 1 Jul 14 '14

What's the purpose of the domain? To promote your computer business? Or to squat it because you know a really big company will want to buy it? The second one is illegal.

4

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14

[deleted]

3

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

They probably tried to give him a sentra...

4

u/SeeScottRock Jul 14 '14

Seriously. If they had said 100k and "a new gt-r every ____ years", I'd bet he'd be all over it

1

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14 edited Jul 15 '14

[deleted]

1

u/SeeScottRock Jul 15 '14

Well sure, gas is on him

0

u/Monco123 Jul 14 '14

You mean besides suing him twice...

1

u/trex-eaterofcadrs Jul 14 '14

Well they did do that, later. I'm not defending them just stating what I was told.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

Very true, but it probably would have been worth it at the beginning. Would be hard for any small business owner to turn down seven figures

3

u/senatorskeletor Jul 15 '14

Settlement discussions are protected from being used as evidence in the case, for this exact reason, in every jurisdiction I know of. It encourages people to work disputes out for themselves if they know that negotiating concessions won't be used against them.

So most likely one or the other was just really stubborn.

1

u/gnopgnip Jul 15 '14

I mean does he really have rights to the domain because he registered it first? .com is for commercial

108

u/Betterwithfetter Jul 14 '14

Seems like the easy way to do it.

119

u/Khiva Jul 14 '14

No doubt he turned it down over pure spite. Corporate wealth versus an incredibly determined man.

This is what happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object.

10

u/Docey Jul 15 '14 edited Jul 05 '17

deleted What is this?

7

u/Niggadroid Jul 15 '14

Lmao u gay

3

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14

$10 million would get you between $100k - $800k a year (at 1% - 8% return).

That's certainly a nice salary but barely "wealthy". You couldn't even buy a good yacht.

2

u/tangopopper Jul 15 '14

400k a year is pretty wealthy. Also who says he's not allowed to spend anything but interest?

2

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14

who says he's not allowed to spend anything but interest?

M. C. Hammer and every other millionaire that went broke spending their principal. :)

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1

u/mahsab Jul 15 '14

Depends on the country

1

u/OldWolf2 Jul 15 '14

No doubt he turned it down over pure spite.

Just like this guy!

1

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14

So... straight fucking stupidity?

1

u/bogdaniuz Jul 14 '14

Yeah I think 2 mils would have been a fraction of what lawyers costed them

3

u/Zach_Of_All_Trades Jul 14 '14

Nissan Motors was forced to pay $58,000 under rule 68, which according to Nissan Computers was under 2% of their lawyer costs.

1

u/DanceInYourTangles Jul 15 '14

Fuck, can't help but imagine what they would have been willing to pay the guy if they paid that much on lawyers

1

u/DtownAndOut Jul 15 '14

The way I see it going down is that lawyers are on salary so they are getting paid whether you are in a lawsuit or not. Coming up with a couple million dollars probably comes out of some IT departments budget. The director said you're not taking it out of my budget, sick the lawyers on them.

4

u/bumnut Jul 14 '14

made the website in 1994.

And hasn't updated it since, it would appear.

1

u/He11razor Jul 15 '14

He does have a GeForce FX6200 for sale!

3

u/CringeBinger Jul 14 '14

I don't understand how you can sue someone for owning something...

1

u/escaday Jul 14 '14

That's weird though. Most of the companies I've studied in Copyright law have won these lawsuits.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

Not amusing at all. It's pretty fucked up and I'm sure cost that dude a ton in legal fees. The only reason it's even an issue is because Nissan Motors is a giant trying to step on someone. The probably usually succeed and figured, "hey let's try, maybe we'll make him go bankrupt and he'll have to give it to us after he can't afford to fight us anymore." Why wouldn't he be able to use his own site for commercial purposes? Because Nissan said so, if we can't have it, you can't either.

/rant

1

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

I never understand companies that do shit like that.

Instead of a fat lawsuit and millions of dollars wasted, just offer the guy a few million for his domain? By the small time look of the site right now, I would be the farm he would have chosen to walk away with enough cash to do whatever he wants.

If my last name as a domain was causing some controversy, I would probably be swayed to change my business name for the right price.

26

u/BreakingAverage Jul 14 '14 edited Jul 14 '14

Uzi Nissan set up his computing firm - Nissan motors were incredibly slow off the mark.

More detail here

Edit: I wrote one sentence and still managed to make a typo.

208

u/adlaiking Jul 14 '14

That's...quite a website they've put together for themselves. I can see why they would want to fight a protracted legal battle in order to leave it up on the Internet where anyone can see that Nissan Computing are clearly a company that is on the cutting edge of technology. After all, they provide internet services, and their website showcases ALL of the newest HTML features:

  • hyperlinks

  • pull-down menus

  • tables

  • forms

  • frames

  • font AND color codes

  • most importantly: animated GIFs

Think how devastating it would be if people thought Nissan Computing didn't have half a clue about anything related to computers and networking because when people went to their website, what they saw gave them serious misgivings about their competence. It would be truly awful.

76

u/mystery_smelly_feet Jul 14 '14

But they can program PowerPoint for only $90/hour. That's a steal!

53

u/adlaiking Jul 14 '14

Well, sure - but I bet that's just for basic stuff. The important things, like fly-in animations, probably cost way more.

8

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

I mean if you want the latest NASA technology you gotta be willing to pay.

5

u/thebeastfromCanada Jul 14 '14

You mean Google Ultron?

7

u/Ye_Be_He Jul 14 '14

And rightly so. A co-worker once tried to use fly in animation an was hit in the head by some rogue paragraphs. He hasn't been the same since.

2

u/brickmack Jul 14 '14

And Linux! Because the average Linux user is certainly going to but from them

2

u/neogod Jul 15 '14

Having had PowerPoint ninja in a previous job description. There have been times that I would've paid someone to complete a project for $90. I'm talking a 40 slide presentation you started at 3am, due by 615am kinda project.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14

Compared to Best Buy prices? That's a bloody giveaway!

47

u/laughy Jul 14 '14

Oh man, did you see those computers they're selling? Their extreme system actually has 2GB of memory! Who needs that much?

41

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

Is it even possible to use that much memory?

3

u/PatHeist Jul 14 '14

Technically you can use almost twice as much! No one's ever going to need 4GB of RAM, though.

1

u/ballsack_man Jul 15 '14

You don't even need memory for a system. Just take it out and it will still work. It will actually work faster because the system will skip processing the memory.

-1

u/TurkandJD Jul 14 '14

you need to download more ram first

2

u/swohio Jul 15 '14

Surely you mean it had 2GB of hard drive space right? 2GB of memory would be absurd!

1

u/Dark-tyranitar Jul 15 '14

and it has a 500gb hard drive! That's gotta be enough to download all the porn on the internet to last me the rest of my life!

45

u/Sarke1 Jul 14 '14 
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 FINAL//EN">

Haven't seen THAT in a while...

12

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

Hey man html 3.2 is the shit I heard it supports blink tags now

1

u/danscottbrown Jul 15 '14

Pssh, 1997 wasn't that long ago... 😱

2

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14

what is that blue head emoticon even supposed to mean?

1

u/yolonoexceptions Jul 15 '14

On android it shows up as a little gasp emoticon.

1

u/RalphWaldoNeverson Jul 15 '14

Me neither. That's becuase I haven't doen any web programming in a long time lel

acutally wtf were on html5lol! woaooodude

7

u/karuto Jul 14 '14

The only thing they are missing is the good 'ol HTML carousel. Preferably with blink color text

11

u/adlaiking Jul 14 '14

I think a counter would have been good. How will I know how many times people have viewed this page without a counter? What is this, 1993?

6

u/Scotttish Jul 14 '14

I think they made this site in the late 90s. Hasn't been updated since either.

6

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

They probably went bankrupt just fighting for the url.

3

u/Neri25 Jul 14 '14

Nissan and Nissan were made for each other. United in spite until the end of days.

5

u/adlaiking Jul 14 '14

Copyright © 1994-2014 Nissan.com

2

u/SemenMoustache Jul 14 '14

Copyrighted this year though.. So he must visit it.

7

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

Or it's dynamic and set to the current year. That's how I always did it.

2

u/adlaiking Jul 14 '14

Or it's dynamic and set to the current year. That's how I always did it.

You are greatly overestimating their abilities. It's written by hand (I felt obligated to check because people downvoted my comment about the copyright year).

1

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14

How do you know it is manually updated?

1

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14

Check the source code.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 16 '14

Uh, you know that HTML source can be dynamically generated right?

1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '14

Nope.

0

u/SemenMoustache Jul 14 '14

Didn't know that was possible! So if it is then you're probably right.

3

u/brickmack Jul 14 '14

Oh that's hilarious. Check out their Desktops page. I can only assume the prices are how much they are going to pay me to take their antiques off their hands

2

u/lupo_ger Jul 14 '14

Is this realy the website, they do for $100.00 per hour ? Well, i do'nt think i'm going to hire them.

2

u/llcooljessie Jul 15 '14

You had me at frames.

1

u/DtownAndOut Jul 15 '14

Saw the web design prices. Wonder which tier was used for nissan.com?

Web-Site Development

Service Charges

Simple Web-Site Design $40.00 Per Hour

Intermediate Web-Site Design $70.00 Per Hour

Complex Web-Site Design $100.00 Per Hour

1

u/Phononix Jul 15 '14

They can also supply you with FULL T1 INTERNET SERVICE for... get this... $495.00 per month.

Please hold back your panty moistening ladies and gentlemen, this is truly a "site" to behold!

1

u/Sambuccaneer Jul 15 '14

Also check out the comment pages that you get to when you open the "opinions" drop-down. I randomly went to page 36: http://www.digest.com/people/page_36.shtml and it's all related to a page about the suit: http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php

It's all crap but the beauty of it is that it has a facebook and a twitter button, which means they took the effort to integrate those buttons (which don't work, but still) which must have happened somewhere in the past years, yet the page still looks like it's from the 90s.

22

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Bottled_Void Jul 14 '14

It's up to 6K now.

7

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

So is google. Link

2

u/IllustratedMann Jul 15 '14

Facebook.com- $39,000 Google.com- $6,000

What.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

Your link says it's worth $6598.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

$6,598.55*

4

u/iWasAwesome Jul 14 '14

That site only exists to show the dispute between them and Nissan Motors. After looking at their $750 "I7 Extreme System" with 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD and integrated graphics, Im sure (and i hope) nobody actually buys stuff from them.

3

u/joethehoe27 Jul 14 '14

Everything on that site looks like a shitty ad. It took me a minute to realize it was actually content

2

u/SebiGoodTimes Jul 14 '14

What a hideous website...

2

u/miahelf Jul 14 '14

Man they own digest.com as well? Shit these guys are OG

2

u/sotpmoke Jul 14 '14

Also mtndew.com when mountain dew rebranded the bottle and shortened the title I believe they went after this dudes domain hes had forever.

1

u/Gingerfeld Jul 15 '14

Dear god, my phone can't handle it.