Football and IP: the Gospel According to the Corinthians

In 2000, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) ordered Sallen Enterprises, the operators of a website devoted to St Paul’s correspondence with the residents of Corinth, to hand over the domain name corinthians.com to a Brazilian soccer club.

The fact that the Pauline epistles predated the Sao Paulo team (founded in 1910) by some 1865 years cut little ice with WIPO. A one-man panel found that ‘the posting was fabricated to divert consumers, or more generally the public interested in visiting what they think is the site of the well known Brazilian soccer team.’ Naturally the decision went down like a lead balloon in Christian circles.