Smith, Jones & Johnson
One Post Office Square
Boston, MA 02109

Dear _____:

Thanks so much for agreeing to look into our domain-name fiasco. As I promised, I am setting forth in this letter additional details about the problem we talked about on the phone, along with some of the general background information you asked for. The letter we received from NSI says that we have approximately 30 days before they take action. Please let me know if you need any more information.

As you know, my partner and I started our company, Cambridge Computer Consultants, back in 1993. We basically provide small and medium-sized businesses with purchasing advice concerning computer equipment, network equipment, software, and services. We have traditionally distributed the advice through a monthly newsletter. We currently have around 10 employees.

In 1995, we registered the internet domain name "smartbuyer.com." Since then, have been moving more and more of our content onto the web. We now have various forums in which buyers can share their thoughts. In addition, we are beginning to enter into deals with vendors of computer equipment and services, whereby they can make their products and services available on-line. The site has been moderately successful, thus far. We have been spending increasing amounts of time and money developing and promoting the site.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, we never bothered to register "smartbuyer" as a trademark.

Last December (December 1997), we received a letter from a company called Smart Software, Inc., based in Seattle, Wa. The letter stated that they sell a popular software package called SmartBuyer, which apparently helps individuals make major purchases, such as cars, homes, etc. The letter also indicated that they have a federally-registered trademark in "smartbuyer." Evidently, they want to create a separate web-page to support their software package. In the letter, they demanded that we transfer the domain name to them. I wrote back indicating that we had no intention of doing so. Having not heard from them for a while, I thought that was the end of it.

Then, just a few days ago, I received a letter from Network Solutions, Inc., the company we registered the domain name with. The letter says that they were contacted by Smart Software, and that they were going to shut down our smartbuyer.com domain within 30 days. (Can they do this?) Obviously, this would be a disaster for our business. We have spent so much time and effort promoting the smartbuyer.com site, and it is just beginning to take off. Changing domain names at this time would be a blow to our business.

Please let me know what our options are.

As a backup plan, I did begin to check to see if other, similar domain names are still available. I learned that the domain name smartbuy.com has been registered by a former employee of ours. He left our company on rather bad terms, and I am afraid that he might use the domain to bad-mouth our site. This is obviously not as immediately important as the smartbuyer.com problem, but, while you are at it, is there anything we can do to prevent this?

Finally, let me just say that I find this whole matter extremely frustrating. Throughout this affair, we have done everything we were supposed to do. We registered our domain name according to the established procedure. We spent time and effort building our site up. Now we are running a serious risk of losing our business. Surely there must be a better way to allocate and distribute domain names. Who is in charge of the system anyway? Is there any way we can get the system to change, maybe through filing a complaint with someone or through lobbying? Any thoughts you might have on better ways of dealing with this general problem -- and whom we might contact to try to get the system changed -- would be much appreciated.

Sincerely,
Jack Strasser
Cambridge Computer Consultants
April 5, 1998

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