[starman]

Many moons ago, AOL bought wow.com. A whois says Jan., 1996.

Things are a little fuzzy here, but either wowinsider.com was bought by AOL, or created by them.

Now, putting two and two together, since World Of Warcraft's acronym is "wow", surely AOL will capitalize on this, right?

For years, they pointed wow.com to wowinsider.com which seems fair. Wow.com was bought long before WoW existed, and it's just a happenstance that the acronym means something that 12 million players use now.

Today, AOL flipped and pointed wowinsider.com to wow.com, and now wowinsider is no more, it's now wow.com.

Now things seem a lot more problematic. You have wow.com branded with Warcraft stuff all over it, and there's no trace of a disclaimer stating it's a fan site.

What's worse is that Blizzard (or more likely Activision) has been sending C&D letters to iPhone app authors and some web sites that use Blizzard's IP. This includes free iPhone apps.

It seems to me that wow.com is opening itself up for a world of hurt.

Am I wrong, or are they skirting the line between legal and C&D?

[olePigeon]

AOL has money and lawyers, iPhone app developer doesn't.

[Big Mac]

1. Blizzard doesn't own the trademark to the acronym WoW, right? From what I've heard from an IP lawyer it's usually difficult to trademark three letter acronyms, aside from IBM which I think is an exception to the rule.

2. A domain name redirect is functionality identical to having that domain name point to the site in question directly. I would think of it as ab = ba. So if they've been redirecting for years and Blizzard hasn't taken action I doubt they would do so now just because of that minor change.

2. It's clearly an AOL service with AOL logos, AOL Terms of Service links and other identifiers.

3. They haven't copied the World of Warcraft or worldofwarcraft.com motif, so it would be harder to prove confusion.

4. WoW.com doesn't seem to be selling any merchandise that would open them up to infringement claims from that angle. That seems to be what Blizzard cares about the most.

5. WoW.com has reported on Blizzard's quests to remove allegedly infringing sites. The site doesn't mention ever having an issue with Blizzard Legal.

Therefore, I don't think there's an issue, but IANAL.