A Contentious Domain

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Imagine your a small-town entrepreneur, looking to build a local business. You may end up using your last name as part of the company name... That's all fine and good and rarely causes a problem. If you were really ahead of the curve -- say, you knew about the Internet in the early to mid-1990s -- maybe you even registered yourself a domain name, your last name followed by the now-ubiquitous dot-com. If you did, chances are you ended up something with a lot more valuable than you bargained for.

Unless your last name is Nissan. In that case, you probably ended up with a big headache -- and a lot of legal bills.

Since the 1980s, Uzi Nissan -- that's his real name -- has owned a number of small businesses branded with his last name. In the early 1990s, he started the Nissan Computer Corporation. He registered the Nissan.com domain in 1994.

More from Now I Know.

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