Amazon tribe challenges U.S. cybersquatter

The Yanomami, involved in a domain name dispute, are native to the Amazon jungle around the Brazil-Venezuela border

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SAO PAULO (Reuters) -- Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, a chief of a primitive Amazon tribe that inhabits virgin rain forest around the Brazil-Venezuela border, has been losing sleep lately.

News that a Florida woman -- lured by the prospect of a Hollywood movie on the tribe -- had nabbed the Yanomami name for the World Wide Web address http://www.yanomami.com and was auctioning it for $25,000 left Kopenawa stewing.

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So much so that the Yanomami, one of the world's true Neolithic peoples, wants to reclaim the Web address ahead of the day it swaps its bows and arrows for cybertools, Fernando Bittencourt of the Pro-Yanomami Commission said Monday.

"I was repelled to see that the name of my people was being used at the head of the (Web) page and that it's going to be sold for $25,000," Kopenawa said in a letter sent recently to Mercedes Meier, the owner of the site.

"The Yanomami name is not up for sale," he wrote.

Talk of a possible Yanomami film prompted Meier to register the domain, thinking "it would be a good business opportunity," she told Reuters on Monday in an e-mail response to questions.

The Pro-Yanomami Commission, a nonprofit group that supports the Indians, found that Meier was using the name -- a practice dubbed cybersquatting -- when it set out to register the address.

"Our idea was to register this name on behalf of the Indians for the future," said Bittencourt, the commission's executive secretary in Brasilia. "Their name is of the utmost importance to them."

While the estimated 26,000 Yanomami still may be far from cyberspace, projects to educate the Indians are moving along so swiftly that educators think the Internet "is not that far away," Bittencourt said.

Meier declined to donate the address, saying in a letter to the commission that she had already received offers of $18,000. The site is registered with Domains.com in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

"If they are thinking on making money on the Internet, then I don't see why they cannot pay for the name," Meier said.

Now Kopenawa and the Yanomami could have a struggle ahead if they want exclusivity over the indigenous name. Web variations are also running thin.

The Brazilian version, http://www.yanomami.com.br, a one-page site carrying a photograph of the lush Amazon, belongs to an unidentified group in the Brazilian city of Campinas. The address http://www.yanomami.net has been grabbed by an unknown owner and is under construction.

At http://www.yanomami.org is a German-language site belonging to Dennis Beseler, who calls himself "Mr. Survival" and features photos of outdoor expeditions.

Meier said she chose the "com" tag over "org," which was available at the time, thinking that the latter was more appropriate for a nonprofit group than "com" or "net" would have been.

Bittencourt said the commission -- which itself is building http://www.yanomami.org.br -- is contacting owners to ask them to donate rights to the indigenous name, which roughly translates as "people of the forest."

Still up for grabs, though, is http://www.yanomami.cc, using the "cc" worldwide domain tag, available via Seattle-based registry eNic Corp. That company recently helped broker the $1 million sale of the domain name beauty.cc.

Another option would be to follow on the heels of pop star Madonna or actress Julia Roberts, who appealed to the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization to reclaim addresses bearing their names.

"We are consulting with lawyers and specialists to try and work out what kind of help we could seek," Bittencourt said.

Brazil is a member state of WIPO, a United Nations body.

Cybersquatting has taken off in past years as people buy potentially popular sites with a view to selling them for a profit later. But "squatting" has exposed gray areas in the law, which varies internationally, analysts said.

Companies like Domainsite.com, an upstart Web address registrar also in Newburyport, sell addresses for a mere $10.

"If the name is available, our job is to provide access to it," President Rick Zanaboni said. "It's up to the legal system to figure out who's right or wrong."

Or as Meier put it, "We live in a commerce world, and that is it."

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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