(181)  Domain names: letter to the editor

Dear Sir 

With regards to your editorial on www.law.ed.ac.uk/sln, no 179, you stated that we intended to build a web portal.  This is completely wrong.  Our website  was already up and working.  The Law Society for the last 2 to 3 years have been trying to buy the name from us and we refused each time. It was only after we refused that they decided to register the name lawscot as a trade mark.  We also discovered that the Society have been advertising our legal property, the name Lawscot.co.uk, in their own journal: check it out for yourself at www.lawscot.org.uk/pdfs/journal_dec99.pdf

 

Also for a time scale of up to 2 years they had advertised our e-mail address on their web site as listed below.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000502072125/http://www.lawscot.org.uk/index.ht

ml

http://web.archive.org/web/19990116225515/www.lawscot.org.uk/mainframe.html

For the last 2 to 3 years we have been passing the e-mails we receive to the Law Society and they thanked us for this.  At no time did we broadcast to any other party that this was happening. We would also inform the firm or person that they sent the e-mail to our address.

 

What I would be interested in is the Law Society of Scotland have taken no

action against the following –

 

lawscot.com/ lawscot.net/lawscot.org 

 

and I would also suggest you run a check and see who has registered the name

Law Society Of Scotland – one of its own members: now would that surprise you.

Also the Law Society have offered us money for the name and each time we refused

 

yours

 

Tommy Butler

 

PS We will be raising an action for damages.