Why you may ask I am making this statement?  Well, wouldn't you know, Lockheed-Martin'$ greedy troll$, who were put on this earth to protect L-M from unscrupulous elements like myself, sent me a really-nice and patronizing letter, dictating, errh, asking nicely, that I stop doing business under my old skunkworks-labs.com domain.  After all, we wouldn't want people to confuse my personal website (that makes decals and such) with L-M (who makes bombs and such), would we?  No, that would be reflect so badly on their reputation...

So, since I do not have the will, time, energy and especially the required $$$ to deal with them, I just changed my domain name.  This is the reason as well why my website has been unavailable for a while while I was migrating it to the new domain.

It is interesting of course that L-M hold$ the patent to the name Skunk Work$, when that division was created due to the US government and money (i.e. our tax money) requirement for the U-2 and other secret projects.  But I'm sure they used the office petty cash fund for it in their books :)

It is also interesting the fact that while they claim the domain name was infringing on their patent, L-M makes no attempt to register those names for themselves, to prevent other people from using them.  It makes perfect sense, why spend the money to keep all those names registered in perpetuity, when you can wait, and if some poor schmuck registers that name, then bring out the steamroller.  This way, the costs fall on the poor schmuck.  It makes no difference that I spent extra money from my own pocket and time I didn't have to get the new domain name and migrate everything to it.

And finally, while I was selling on Ebay with the ID skunkworks-labs, the L-M troll$ did not say anything about it in their letter.  Could it be the trolls figured out they couldn't do anything about that because they would have to take on and deal with Ebay, i.e. spend money?  But I changed my Ebay ID anyway as well, to match my new domain name.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, it is pure greed.  And for those that will argue that a company has a right to protect their rights and all the other associated crap, sorry, those are pure greedy excuses.

Sorry for the rant, if you want to read the letter I was sent, click here to see it (in order to protect myself from those greedy fackers, I blanked out some personal information)

Sidenote:  Most companies use an outsourced "rights management" company (a.k.a. trolling attorney$) that troll$ the net and other places looking for true or perceived-infringement. Then they send a demand letter and get to keep over 50% of the licensing fees and the company gets the rest, without any cost to it for maintaining its' rights. The 'Rights' company is very aggressive and unless you are a lawyer or know the words to use to slow them down they'll steamroller over you with all kinds of threats. Add to that mix the fact that the ICANN and it's lackies are not pro-Internet freedom but pro-big bu$ine$$, and sprinkle it with some very antiquated and anachronistic patent/trademark rules, and you pretty-much have no recourse.