Now New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, once next year's obvious choice for mayor, can’t even shake the domain squatters that plague her at ChristineQuinn.com—a marked contrast to the current mayor’s regular purchase of or demand for nearly any Web site that contains his name. (Amusingly, the 2001 Bloomberg arbitration decision for MichaelBloombergSucks.com—one of the few times he was not successful—concluded that “the ‘sucks’ suffix precludes any reasonable person from believing that the domain name is associated with or authorized by Complainant.”)
And although use of Ms. Quinn’s last name is not trademarked, as the mayor’s is, the site may have stepped over a line by claiming that she “runs a shell game of fake groups to hide her political slush fund.”
Or that may be an accurate assessment. Quinn, and the Council, have two weeks to answer a demand for a judicial hearing, a demand entered in New York State Supreme Court by Norman Siegel and others, on behalf of a motley crew of plaintiffs.
(That group includes Rafael Martinez Alequin, a reporter or former reporter who made a big to-do when his NYPD-issued press pass was not renewed early last year; he now runs a site at yourfreepress.blogspot.com, which lifts the content straight from newspaper Web sites—right down to the in-house keyword links of The New York Times.)
But no one is in charge downtown now. Can you imagine who loses?
Who's Running New York?
