Brewery sues for its .com Internet address

By PHILIP ENGLISH and NZPA

Lion Breweries is taking on a Waikato farmer over his use of the company's Steinlager beer brand on an Internet Website.

Wallace Waugh registered the steinlager.com site more than two years ago and complained yesterday that the company had threatened and pestered his family since.

Lion Breweries is filing an action with the Swiss-based World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to claim back the Steinlager domain name.

The company said yesterday that Mr Waugh had refused to give the name back without a significant cash payment, but Lion was not prepared to pay for the return of its own property.

Mr Waugh would not go into details but it is understood he and his son use the steinlager.com name for an electronics business.

He said it was successfully attracting clients, including one in the US who took $400,000 worth of exports a year.

"We actually needed that [site] for a job and we got it. A considerable time later [Lion] rang up and said they wanted it. They tried to bully us into it. I said, 'no.' We had spent $20,000 on developing our Website on it and they offered me beer.

"What I should have said was, 'Right, I'll take about five dozen and make them cold and every Friday deliver them to my home for the next 20 years ... I had to tell them I was not a drinker, but I could have run a club if I'd got enough."

Mr Waugh said Lion had to pay all the costs associated with the WIPO case but in the meantime use of the site was frozen.

"The real story in it is the morality of large individuals trying to trample other people underneath for whatever they want.

"We are not interfering in their business. We don't particularly want to ... Why should we give it up when we have spent our money and they just say they want it?"

Lion is believed to be the first New Zealand company to seek a ruling from WIPO, which issued its first domain name decision last month. In that case it found in favour of the World Wrestling Federation's bid to claim its name back from a "cybersquatter."

The Lion corporate affairs director, Graham Seatter, said the company was willing to compensate Mr Waugh for any costs in establishing and maintaining the domain site, but no more.