The 12 year-old boy at the center of one of the most prominent recent trademark-domain name disputes will keep his domain name, pokey.org, as the Prema Toy Co, which tried to grab the name to promote its ‘Pokey’ toy has withdrawn its claim to the name and it has been released back to the boy. In a spectacular piece of bad PR, Prema wrote to Network Solutions Inc (NSI), which registers all domains in .com, .net and .org, saying it owned the Pokey trademark and therefore NSI should suspend the use of the name pending a resolution of the case and NSI duly obliged. After many column inches of bad publicity for both Prema and NSI’s dispute resolution policy – including a few of our own – Art Clokey, the president of Prema and creator of Pokey and his sidekick Gumby, instructed the company’s lawyers to let the child, Christopher Van Allan – ‘Pokey’ is his lifelong nickname – keep the pokey.org address, in the spirit of Gumby, as Clokey put it in his letter to the attorneys.
