Yell sees red over YelloWikis
Lawyers for Reading-based Yell, the company behind good old Yellow Pages, have started pursuing a 15 year old girl – Rosa Blaus – and her father, for setting up YelloWikis, a free-to-edit ‘Yellow Pages for the 21st century’.
Perhaps Yell hoped that they had the Yellow Pages for the 21st century. Just Yell… and then yell some more.
Apparently the site ‘plainly purports to be associated with Yell’ – even though when I visited it (and yes, it could’ve been changed) it looked like a Wiki about ‘Yello’. Whoever Yello are? Sure, it contains business listings, but it didn’t remind me of YP.
One of the demands is that the domain YelloWikis.org be passed to Yell – probably to lie dormant as I didn’t think companies knew what a Wiki was (they’ve only just discovered blogging, haven’t they?)
Another demand is that compensation is paid to Yell for loss of
profits. What, for all those companies that somehow managed to pay
YelloWikis to advertise even though it’s a free site.
Not surprisingly, YelloWikis isn’t running scared (tempted to say
"they’re not yello" but that’d be a really bad pun, so I won’t). On
their site they’ve organised pages to help draft a response to Yell,
created a list of differences between Yell and YelloWikis, plus a
suggestions page for a new name if they lose, and a donations page.
Well it’s certainly boosted their profile if nothing else. Apparently
James Wales, founder the granddaddy of them all, Wikipedia, has offered
his support to the pair.
I just hope they don’t decide to go ‘easy’, or they’ll get Stelios on their case instead.
What do you reckon?
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