Jethro Tull News

(7/31/00, 12 p.m. ET) - In the battle against "cybersquatting," Jethro Tull has been declared victorious, but Sting has been stung.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) ruled on Friday (July 28) that Denny Hammerton of Florida must surrender the Internet domain names jethrotull.com and jethro-tull.com to the band, since he had no real right to them.

Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson filed suit against Hammerton back in May, accusing the man of "cybersquatting," or possessing an Internet domain name and address, without having any connection to them. Often, people register such names in the hopes of making money by selling them to the rightful owners, and Anderson's representatives testified that Hammerton offered to sell the band the names for $13,000. WIPO decided that Hammerton's names were too close to the band's trademarked moniker and ordered him to transfer them to Jethro Tull.

It's unclear what the band will do with the names, since there's already an official website at j-tull.com. Anderson is proud of the site, which only came online last year with the release of the album J-Tull Dot Com. "We waited until we felt the time was right to really make it a very much hands-on, internally-operated site," he said. "And just as we make music in the studio--we're the guys doing it--it's the same with the web site. We're the guys who do it. I write most of the stuff for it, and Andrew Giddings, our keyboard player, taught himself the necessary programming skills to author the website and do the graphics. So, it's actually run by the band and really is a reflection of the band in the most essential way that it could be."

While the guys in Jethro Tull are celebrating their victory, Sting is licking his wounds after losing a similar case last week. The arbitrator in his case against Michael Urvan of Georgia ruled that while Sting is world famous, it's not his real name (he was born Gordon Sumner), and he's never registered the name Sting.

Furthermore, the ruling said that "sting" is a common English word, making it that much harder to protect in a case like this. The battle was over the domain name sting.com, which Urvan has been using for eight years.

-- Bruce Simon, New York

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