What's it Worth? Instead of continuing to wrangle with Jack Marshall
over the domain name address www.altavista.com, Compaq Computer opted
to simply pay him $3.35 million for it. Marshall has had his company,
AltaVista Technology, registered on the Internet under that domain
name since 1994. Recent Compaq acquisition Digital Equipment Corp. has
had the popular AltaVista Web search engine online since 1995. With
the popularity of such search/portal sites on the increase, users
began looking for the AltaVista search site with increasing
frequency. But typing www.altavista.com took the user to Marshall's
site, not to the search engine's site (www.altavista.digital.com). A
preliminary agreement had been reached between Marshall and DEC, but
the parties fell to quarreling again in 1996. So the $3.35 million
settlement brings the controversy to a final close. San Francisco
Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/07/28/BU387.DTL&type=printable