After legal fight, 11-year-old ordered to turn over Narnia.mobi domain

An 11-year-old Scottish boy who received a dream birthday present that later turned into a legal quagmire must now turn over his narnia.mobi domain name back to the estate of C.S. Lewis.

Comrie Saville-Smith, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, is a fan of the C.S. Lewis Narnia novels, and his parents decided to give him the narnia.mobi dobmain once it became available in September 2006.

The .mobi domain was created by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as a top-level domain for mobile sites. Before being opened up to the public, similar to other TLD launches, there was a grace period for trademark holders to reserve domains.

The estate of C.S. Lewis, however, did not snap up the domain by the Sept. 22, 2006 deadline, and the Saville-Smith family purchased it four days later.

The estate did not take legal action until May 2008, when it filed an official complaint with the United Nation's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Switzerland. The organization told the boy's family that it ruled in favor of the estate and said the domain must be turned over.

Attorneys claimed Saville-Smith infringed on the estate's trademark, along with other copyright issues. Saville-Smith countered by saying the family reserved the domain so their son could have an e-mail address with the @narnia.mobi domain as a birthday present for his 11th birthday, on May 20, 2008.

But when the WIPO was unable to find any evidence the family actually intended to create an e-mail address for their son, even after 20 months, it was forced to rule in the estate's favor, due to the family allegedly using the domain name in "bad faith."

An appeal will likely be filed by the family in the United States, where the .mobi domain is based.