By John Donovan
Since we have many new American visitors, we thought some might be interested and amused by the story of how Shell management attempted in proceedings launched via The World Intellectual Property Organisation to seize three Shell related domain names including the domain name for this website – royaldutchshellplc.com.
This happens to be the precise dotcom domain name for the unified company Royal Dutch Shell Plc.
It was of course an uneven contest with Shell and its army of 650 in-house lawyers, including Shell Legal Director Richard Wiseman on one side and an 88 year old 2nd World War veteran, Alfred Donovan (my father) on the other, who had no legal representation. Shell lost the action on all three domain names.