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Aral Balkan

Yeah, well Aral’s my name as a human being and my petroleum company namesake can go take a flying fuck because trademark law does not apply. First time I’m seeing this notice. The Internet is for people not corporations. Maybe it’s time we remembered that and starting implementing laws to ensure it before we lose it altogether.

What’s worse? I Want My Name showed it to me as taken when it wasn’t. WTF, folks? Going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s a bug.

@aral thats insane; Gandi seems like one of the last registrars to ever want to enact this type of policy, too.

@aral Your name has been trademarked

@aral I (not a lawyer) think the petroleum company can't be granted exclusive right to a word that is both a common personal name and several major place names.
They can have exclusivity within a field of market, but you are not going to compete within the petroleum industry, now are you? ;-D
That's a reason why companies and products often have entirely new words created for them, so that they can then claim that word entirely (unless they fail "maintaining" the exclusivity and it becomes a widely used word anyway, like how e.g. Xerox lost the exclusive right to the name when "xeroxing" became a commonly used verb).

@aral ironically, Shell once sued the owner of shell.de, Andreas Shell.
Unfortunately he lost. 😐

@aral is it not .dev a google registry domain?