A family in Edinburgh has been ordered to give up the Narnia.mobi domain they registered as a gift for their son to the estate of C.S. Lewis. An arbitration panel of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) rejected their claim that using it for an e-mail was fair use, and noting that nothing else was done with the domain name. The family believes that since they didn’t try to make any money or pass themselves off as connected to Narnia there was no evidence of bad faith, but the panel decided that “as prior panels have observed, when a domain name is so obviously connected with a complainant and its products or services, its very use by a registrant with no connection to the Complainant suggests ‘opportunistic bad faith’,” reports Out-Law.

It also indicated that although fair comment (such as fan sites or critical sites) are in good faith, dot-mobi names have to be utilized as soon as they’re registered or risk a challenge: “The language of…the Policy is couched in the present tense and unambiguously requires a respondent to be ‘making a legitimate non-commercial or fair use of the domain name.’,” said the ruling. “The Policy only concerns active websites that practice genuine, non-commercial criticism, and only deals with fan sites that are clearly active and non-commercial.”

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