Domain squatting in Wonderland
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
A few months back, I did a little digging online and discovered, much to my surprise, that the url www.timburtonsalice.com wasn't taken. It seemed like a really weird oversight. I mean, Tim Burton had an upcoming movie, based on Alice in Wonderland. This was Tim Burton's Alice we were talking about. But nobody at Disney had thought to buy the url. So I bought it. For $12.
I've never tried "domain squatting" before, and didn't know what to expect. I didn't think Disney was going to cough up millions of dollars, but I figured that if they paid me even $25 for the url, I would've more than doubled my investment. What could it hurt to try, right?
Well, it turns out Disney wanted nothing to do with me. I called their LA headquarters a few times and was put through to PR people who acted like I was trying to sell them a dead gerbil. They were openly disdainful, I could actually hear them sneering over the phone.
It was weird. I owned www.timburtonsalice.com, and I was willing to let them have it for just about anything. Like, a free day at Disneyland? That would've been fine. If they'd sent me The Black Hole on DVD, I would've been fine with that. I wasn't threatening to post porn on the site, or doing anything sleazy like that. But they made me feel like some guy with a cheap suit and a greasy mustache, calling them up at 3 AM from a payphone outside of a 7-11.
So. Apparently Disney has no use for www.timburtonsalice.com. Go figure. I've posted a few Alice-related articles from this site over there, but that's it. It's just sitting there.
Anybody got any suggestions for what the heck I should do with it?
1 comments:
Start posting bad reviews of the movie, you'll get a call.
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