Name games

Soon after Chinese athletes won unrivaled victories and applause during the Beijing Olympic Games, all of the Chinese gold medal winners also found a special gift on the Internet.

On August 23, China's General Administration of Sport announced the launch of 222 online domain names for Chinese Olympic gold medal winners, putting an end to the long chaos resulting from the malicious domain name registrations of sports celebrities.

The domains coincide with the names (or names in Pinyin) of individual Chinese athletes and are currently linked to the athlete introduction page on the official website of the administration.

But the government watchdog says the domain names will soon be given for personal use to the individual athletes who may establish their personal websites or blogs based on the online addresses.

Most of the names were preregistered by the General Administration of Sport before the Olympic Games, according to the sport administration. But many individual domain name owners donated the names.

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the official domain names regulator, made an appeal during the Beijing Olympic Games to the individuals who had registered the athlete domain names to donate their ownership to support the Games. As a result, many gave up their ownership.

A domain name is the online address of a website. It could be registered by anyone and its ownership belongs to those who register first, according to Chinese regulations.

After the Chinese government opened its domain name registration to individual applicants in 2000 and made it a business, the cost of registration has declined. In some cases the registration fee for a certain domain name could be as low as one yuan.

These moves, together with the rising importance of the Internet, have led to a flood of domain name registrations in China in recent years. Some individuals even made large profits by registering "promising" domain names and then selling them to companies or organizations.

In the first half of this year, the number of registered domain names in China reached 14.85 million, an increase of 61.8 percent over the same period of last year. But the number of online websites in China hit only a paltry 1.91 million, according to CNNIC figures.

After the International Olympic Committee (ICO) made a decision last December to allow Chinese sports officials and athletes who participated in the Beijing Olympic Games to open personal blogs on the Internet, domain names of the famous Chinese athletes become hot online assets for these "domain name investors".

Although many domain name owners voluntarily gave up their ownership after CNNIC's appeal, some unnamed domain name owners showed their discontent by complaining that CNNIC actually withdrew some of their domain names by force and without any notice.

But CNNIC says in a statement that China's sport administration made an application to register domain names of all of the Chinese gold medal winners before the Olympic Games and so it is legal to take back some of the domain names registered after that. It claims it already refunded the registration fees to the original domain name owners.

Yu Guofu, chief lawyer at Sam Partners Law Firm, says CNNIC as the official domain name regulator has the right to keep certain domain names in advance in accord with regulations. But he says the domain name owners also have the right to challenge CNNIC's act through legal channels.

By the first half of this year, the number of Chinese Internet users reached 253 million, seeing China surpass the United States with the world's largest online population.

The increasing online population has had major Chinese online websites such as Sina.com and Sohu.com grasping every opportunity to attract Chinese online users.

During the Beijing Olympic Games, China's big portal websites invested a huge amount of money in deals with Chinese sports teams for the right to get exclusive information and interview opportunities.

Many websites operators have also signed contract with famous Chinese athletes to open personal blogs on their websites to attract traffic.

Editor's note: The IPR Special is sponsored by the State Intellectual Property Office and published by China Business Weekly. To contact the Intellectual Property Office, the IPR Special hotlines are 8610-64995422 or 8610-64995826, and the e-mail address is ipr@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily 10/13/2008 page9)