WIPO vs Narnia

The parents' weepy story: the C.S. Lewis Estate has gone all Aslan on their asses because they purchased the narnia.mibo domain for their Caspian-crazed son, dragging them into court and causing them to rack up heavy legal bills to defend an 11-year old's birthday present. WIPO weighed in and handed the C.S. Lewis Estate back the domain.

The real story seems to make the parents look pretty bad, though:

C.S. Lewis Ltd. first offered to buy the domain from Saville-Smith for £70 (about $140), according to The Scotsman, an offer the family rejected. After several attempts to play nicely, the estate submitted a domain dispute resolution request on May 28, 2008 to WIPO. Since then, both parties have submitted a number of documents arguing that they are the rightful owners to the domain. Saville-Smith told WIPO that, since he has no commercial motive for registering the domain, he should be allowed to keep it. However, a handful of evidence seems to have convinced WIPO that he registered it in bad faith.
For one, Saville-Smith registered 12 other .mobi domains just days after the registration of naria.mobi, including middleearth.mobi, ovaloffice.mobi, pentagon.mobi, primeminister.mobi, and uspresident.mobi. (For those who don't recognize some of these names, Middle Earth is a fictional land where stories by Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien take place, and Spooks is a TV drama on the BBC). Almost all of these pages were parked at Sedo with plenty of clickthrough advertising on them.

I guess I'm more surprised that anyone would go to court to take back a .mobi domain.

WIPO orders Narnia domain transfer, makes 11 year old cry [Ars Technica]