Booble For Porn Before Google's Lawyers Show Up
from the this-won't-last-long... dept
Well, I'm almost surprised that no one had come up with this before - but an unnamed internet executive who was joking around with his web development team somehow got to wondering why there was no good "porn search engine" online. There's Google, of course, which offers to exclude pornographic images - but not the other way around. So, these guys went ahead and built their own porn engine, and came up with the wonderful name Booble. The design might look a little familiar, and I imagine that Google's lawyers might not let the site stick around very long.
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Like yawoo.com?
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there was a guy who didn't pay his bills
The lack of bill paying is why a cyber-squatter has that name now.
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Google vs. Booble: Parody or Publicity Stunt
Designed with a striking resembleance to Google, a new pornography search engine was launched on January 20. Booble.com was hit with so much traffic just 24 hours after its launch that its servers went down temporarily, trying to serve over 100,000 requests. How was this “marketing success” achieved?
Remember MikeRoweSoft vs Microsoft. Microsoft conceded that it may have taken its trademark rights “a little too seriously” in pursuing the 17-year-old Canadian high school student and settled amicably. The settlement followed a crush of international publicity, much of it casting Microsoft as Goliath vs. Rowe as David, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of visitors to MikeRoweSoft.com.
One week later, Booble appears sending press releases positioning itself to be the David in a fight against Google, which it claims it merely wants to parody.
But Booble’s founder is no Mike Rowe. Booble’s founder has an established sister porn site, Sir Rodney.com. Mike Rowe was also not earning money from everyone of click as Booble/SirRodney does. Unlike Mike Rowe, Booble’s founder is too embarrassed to give his name because he does not want to be associated with porn, while at the same time mocking Google for not wanting to be associated with his porn.
I have never been a fan of large companies over aggressively enforcing their trademark rights a position I have stated in my eBook on business domain names, at seemly.com. But in this case, it’s likely that Booble intentionally got itself into this trademark mess for the publicity and is a disgrace to legitimate trademark difficulties such as MikeRoweSoft.
A harmless publicity stunt? Not to Google’s image or legal costs.
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L
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