Net power thwarts online domain eviction bid

Wired on Friday: What's in a domain name? To a Penguin editor back in 2000, not much, it seems, writes Danny O'Brien.

Back then, in the heyday of the Net boom, the book publisher was putting the final touches on girl.com, a non-fiction paperback that told the disturbing true story of a young teenager, Katie Tarbox, who narrowly avoided an internet chatroom abduction.

One small publicity quirk: girl.com, while a fantastic title, turned out to be the website of a porn business. Not the best connotation for a book aimed at the young adult market. Nonplussed, the editor changed the title - to katie.com. And the mighty Penguin publicity machine began promoting katie.com, a shocking revelation of the dark side of the net, in earnest.

Now, the real Katie.com - the website answering to that name on the net - belongs to a friend of mine, Katie Jones. She has nothing to do with the book. Before they published, Penguin made no approach to her to purchase the domain.

Not that she would have said yes, anyway: the domain was bought by her husband for her in the early days when such memorable .coms were still available (he is gareth.com). She used katie.com for her email address, her family photos and her work CV. For Katie Jones, Katie.com is her online home.

But as soon as the book's publicity hit the newspapers, Katie Jones quickly found that her home was being invaded. Anguished email by teenagers and curious readers, aimed at Katie Tarbox, arrived at katie@katie.com. Worse: Katie Jones's job was operating a British chatroom site. Even though her site worked hard to protect its teenage users, the potential for confusion between her website and the horrific chatroom tale told by Tarbuck was great.

Was Penguin's act malicious - or illegal? Perhaps back in 2000, a certain naivety about the ramifications of naming a book after a domain might be forgivable. But domains aren't known as "net addresses" for nothing. Publishing a book named after a domain name was tantamount calling your latest novel after a random phone number - and neglecting to check with the person living there.

We don't have a law against such a title, but nowadays most people - even book publishers - have a phone number. We understand what damage we'd wreak if we handed out someone else's phone number on the cover of books. Our own collective common sense steps in. That's why every American film phone number begins with "555". We just know too much about the importance of telephone numbers to mess up in this way.

Back then, though, Penguin couldn't care less. They refused to change the book's title, and refused to acknowledge the problem.

Fast forward to 2004. Earlier this month, a lawyer claiming to represent Katie Tarbox called Katie Jones, saying that the "katie.com" mark was trademarked, and she might as well give them the domain for free because things could "only get worse". The story behind the book was recently repackaged for Court TV (still under the original title). And Tarbox, the lawyer said, was working on a school curriculum project to teach kids about online safety - called Katie.com.

For Katie Jones, this was the irritating return of an old problem about which she could do nothing. These days, the domain is largely useless for anything but talking about the domain name confusion. The telephone calls are unpleasant and stressful (the lawyer called just a few weeks after Jones had given birth to her second daughter). But she knew, from last time, that there was very little she could do. The law was ambiguous; and Penguin had proven stubbornly resistant to her pleas.

But this time around, Jones had rather more on her side. The net occupies a far greater space in our culture and businesses than when katie.com, the book, first launched.

Within days of news of the new lawyer threats, the reviews of katie.com on Amazon were filled with negative, zero-star pannings of the book. Type "katie.com" into Google, and you'll see pages damning the publisher's attitude, with a few tiny mentions of where or how to buy the book itself. Journalists, who in an earlier time might have struggled to explain to their readers what ".com" meant, could readily explain what Katie Jones felt, when her online home was taken away by the big, nasty corporation.

Last week, after years of ignoring the problem, but only days after this new controversy reared its head online, Penguin caved. They changed the book title; they asserted that they'd never do anything with "Katie.com" again. And they denied all knowledge of the attack lawyer sent after Jones.

It's a salutary lesson in the growing power of the net. These days, it is possible for quieter, net-savvy voices like Jones to compete for attention with big guns like Penguin. Book publishers (and any other consumer-facing company) cannot afford to ignore a negative "buzz" online.

And besides the bad publicity, what about the sense of a publishing house that splatters press releases about for a book, all of which list a web address that points to the wrong website? Do we see advertising hoardings for "Goggle.com" or "Yaho.co.uk" ?

These days, naming a book after a domain that someone else owns seems more than rude. It's a marketing disaster waiting to happen. It's astounding that it took so long for Penguin to see it that way.