The Chicago Tribune Tries to Take Our Website

By octrib_admin • May 30, 2012 •

All the news that's fit to fence off. 
(Photo by Maximiliano Sanvitale; Creative Commons license)

 By Nick Burt,

 Our tip-off came, poetically enough, from some unsolicited email marketing:

Dear Occupied Chicago Tribune:
Our records indicate that a UDRP (Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy) proceeding was filed against you for the domain http://occupiedchicagotribune.org.

It was a message from a New York legal firm, offering us a defense against an unnamed complainant who had filed to seize our domain name. But before even checking the record, we knew who was doing the complaining. It wasn’t the Sun-Times.

On May 24, the Tribune Company filed a Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) proceeding against the Occupied Chicago Tribune via the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), presumably alleging trademark infringement. We presume this, as to date, almost a week later, we have yet to receive any formal notification that the complaint has been filed, nor a description of the Tribune Company’s claims.

If the UDRP complaint is successful, the WIPO panel would order the transfer of our domain to the Tribune Company. The Occupied Chicago Tribune will appeal to the panel to dismiss the complaint.
This is the second attempt in the Tribune Company’s ongoing effort to shut down the Occupied Chicago Tribune, despite what is agreed by multiple legal experts as a lack of any legal grounding.

As we described in an earlier editorial, the Tribune Company sent an attorney to intimidate us with threats of a lawsuit at the end of last year.

Continue reading: OCCUPIED CHICAGO TRIBUNE