DOHA, Qatar, Nov. 21 (UPI) -- Al Jazeera, which is relentless in reporting U.S. involvement in Iraq and other major stories, has so far been less forthcoming about a legal dispute involving its own Web site.
An Al-Jazeera executive told United Press International Saturday the case is ongoing, but confirmed the story so far leaves two news Web sites with the same domain name -- and only one belongs to the Arab language satellite television news channel.
Aljazeera.net is the official site of the Qatar-based television company: But there is also aljazeera.com, operated by the AJ Publishing of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, and London. In March, the Qatar channel filed a complaint at the World Intellectual Property Arbitration and Mediation Center in Geneva requesting that the Dubai/London-based site stop using the same domain name, and charging the other company with breach of copyright and "bad faith."
According to a Mediation Center document, the Qatari news channel's complaint stated that aljazeera.com was "confusingly identical" to its own trademark, and "portrayed itself to be the same entity" as the news channel in order to benefit from Al Jazeera's international reputation and prestige. To support this allegation, Al Jazeera quoted a 2001 BBC story that had by mistake incorrectly identified aljazeera.com as the news organization's Web site.
The owners of aljazeera.com countered they were there first with the domain name, having registered it in 1992 in English: Al Jazeera began using the name as its stylized screen logo in Arabic in 2001. Even today, aljazeera.com is mainly an English-language Web site, while aljazeera.net is in Arabic, with a secondary page available in English.
Furthermore, said the Dubai firm, Al Jazeera had waited for four years to make a formal complaint, and all the while, despite protests, had allowed its correspondents to use aljazeera.com as the address for their communications with Doha, which had caused confusion.
Aljazeera.com also pointed out that it publishes a cautionary note on its Web site, saying that the site is "not associated with the controversial Arabic Satellite Channel known as Jazeera Space Channel TV station, whose Web site is aljazeera.net." Observers noted that the notice is not displayed permanently on the screen, however, but in the Web site's "about us" section.
Satnam Matharu, Al Jazeera's chief communications executive, confirmed in Doha that the network had lost the case, and was now considering its next step, probably an appeal. He said the four-man arbitration panel in Geneva had ruled in favor of the Dubai company.
According to case documents, three out of the four panel members agreed with the Dubai/London company that "jazeera"(which is "island" in Arabic) was "a geographical location and as such is a generic, non-unique word over which no person can claim proprietary rights." The panel's written ruling further says the Al Jazeera complaint was "brought in bad faith and constitutes an abuse of the Administrative Proceeding."
Matharu described AJ Publishing as "an individual operator who gets news feeds." In fact, the Web site, as seen in recent days, gives little indication of the sources of its stories. Al Jazeera, on the other hand, has an ever expanding network of around 30 bureaus and correspondents reporting to the company's main Arab-language state-of-the-art studio in the Qatari capital.
But the panel ruling questioned Al Jazeera's claim that it had only "recently" become aware of the existence of aljazeera.com, and said that in continuing to use aljazeera.com as its e-mailing address for its correspondents had not acted in good faith.
Al-Jazeera claims, not without justification to be the first independent television news channel in the Arab world, "looking at things from multiple perspectives," as Matharu puts it. He says Al Jazeera, which was founded in 1996 by the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, effectively broke the "centuries of real stranglehold of government control over media in the Middle East." The Bush administration accuses the network of an anti-American bias; but according to Al Jazeera executives, militant Islamists, including on one occasion Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who leads the al-Qaida terrorist network in Iraq, complain of its lack of commitment to jihad, the Islamic struggle against non-believers.
Inside the Al Jazeera newsroom, a framed document spells out its policy statement in both Arabic and English. The channel pledges to "distinguish between news material, opinion and analysis to avoid the snares of special action and propaganda." It further states that Al Jazeera "adheres to the journalistic rules of honesty, courage, fairness, balance, independence, credibility, and diversity, giving no priority to commercial or political considerations."
News sources in Doha said Al Jazeera is challenging the rival Web site now because it plans to launch its own exclusively English-language news and commentary channel, Al-Jazeera International, next year and would like to have a clear field for its new news venture.
