With Colorado and Utah making the transition into the Pac-10, the West Coast conference is rebranding itself as the Pac-12. In addition to a new logo and plans to hold a conference championship game in football, the conference realizes that the change in conference name will result in purchasing new stationery, branded pens and a new website domain.
But getting the domain for Pac12.com will not be as easy as you might expect, because Pac12.com is already taken. A dedicated fan of the deceased rapper Tupac Shakur currently owns the domain. Shakur was shot four times and killed in a Las Vegas incident in 1996. The shooting was one of the key events that ended a coastal feud between rappers, but some fans still refuse to believe he was killed and await his return.
The conference is taking steps to gain ownership of the domain, which offers no content other than a widget to MP3 downloads of full albums by Shakur or single-song downloads on Amazon. Last week the conference filed a claim against the domain owner with the World Intellectual Property Forum, which prompted the domain owner to throw up the Amazon widget after reportedly sitting on the domain name with no Web page set up.
For the Pac-10, this is nothing new. The conference previously had to claim the Pac10.com domain from advertising and marketing company Marchex. Marchex owned the domain until 2009 when the Pac-10 picked up the rights to the Web address it uses today.
The conference may have to shell out some money in order to buy the rights to the domain or think of an alternative that is both convenient and easy to remember. It does not get much more simple than Pac12.com, though, and the conference likely realizes that it needs that Web address.
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Comments
Tupac's dead? When? How?
Who is Tupac?
I heard Tupac was a mexarab. Is that true? www.mexarab.com
Guess what PAC12, you don't OWN the domain. You want it, you need to purchase it; that simple. I am so sick of these large entities kicking the little people around; perhaps if you get the domain through corrupt legal means, your website will get shut down repeatedly with denial of service attacks.
Yes, the little man has other weapons and yes the little man can turn into a swarm of fire ants, ready to eat you alive. Alone, he is easily squashed, but together they can send ya running eh!
Pac 12 has zero rights to this domain, they should just pay this guy to buy it off him and stop being snobby,
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