Oculus Rift is attempting to seize the oculusrift.com domain from the group of developers currently using it, according to documentation obtained by Kotaku.
Itās a battle that the VR company is almost guaranteed to win, given their ownership of the āOculus Riftā trademark. According to the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), the internationally-recognized process for squabbles over website domains, one person or company can wage legal warfare against another if a domain is āidentical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights.ā
Oculus says they deserve the URL, arguing in their UDRP complaint that oculusrift.comās āuse and exploitation of the Oculus Marks constitutes cybersquatting, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and/or unfair competition in violation of applicable law.ā
A developer named Ivan Smirnov first registered oculusrift.com in June of 2012, not long after the Oculus Rift prototype was first shown off. (Oculus launched their high-profile Kickstarter campaign that August.) Since then, oculusrift.com has hosted developer forums for fans, hobbyists, and professionals working on games for the VR hardware. As of this past weekend, the forums have been shut down.
Smirnov first contacted me about the domain dispute last week, saying he felt betrayed that Oculus was going after what he says is a group of dedicated fans.
āWeāre a team of VR enthusiasts,ā he said in an e-mail. āWe considered ourselves a part of the Oculus developer community. Weāve been building a developer-oriented community on social media and oculusrift.com for the last couple of years. As volunteers, [we spent] our personal time helping the company. For example, our Google Plus community has about the same amount of subscribers as the official one. If not more. Weāre not selling anything. All our social media outlets/websites had zero advertisement.ā
Their social media pages use curious titlesātheir Facebook page, for example, is called Oculus Rift VR Headset and occasionally copies messages from the official Oculus Facebook, a fact thatās brought up in the VR companyās complaint against the domain holders. Their Google Plus page is misleadingly called +OculusRiftOfficial
Oculus, which was purchased by Facebook early last year, currently uses the domain oculus.com. The VR company and other various parties have tried to obtain oculusrift.com in the past, according to Smirnov, but he never came close to a deal with anyone. āIāve been receiving requests from different people who wanted to buy traffic or buy the domain itself,ā he said. āOf course we never did that, we have no ads and we donāt do this for profit. Weāre fans and developers, not cybersquatters. ā
Now, Oculusās lawyers have filed an official complaint through the UDRP.
āOculus lawyers contacted us saying that we should transfer our project āto their client now and for no money,āā Smirnov said. āWhen we refused, they responded with a threat of legal action. In fact, theyāre so generous that they will āgive us some amount of time to move your content to another domain.āā
Smirnov says heād asked for $58,000 in exchange for the domain, but Oculusās lawyers turned down the offer. Heās upset by what he views as a betrayal of the developer communityāāPeople should know how ruthless and greedy the company has become,ā he said in his first e-mail to meāand he says the website made it clear that this was an unofficial domain.
Oculus declined to comment on this story.
You can reach the author of this post at [emailĀ protected] or on Twitter at @jasonschreier
