Chapter 26 growing pains tree

When the registered users of QQ spread and grew like grass in early spring, Ma Huateng and his Tencent company received two letters from lawyers. In just a few dozen days from August to September 1999, America Online, which acquired the ICQ software and the icq.com domain name, sent two severely worded complaint letters to Tencent. The domain names oicq.com registered on January 26 and oicq.net registered on November 7, 1998 infringed its intellectual property rights and asked Tencent to transfer the domain names oicq.com and oicq.net to them for free. The big background at that time was that after the merger of Time Warner and AOL, it formed a strategic partnership with Hong Kong China Entertainment Television and officially entered the Chinese market.OICQ, which was very popular in China, copied ICQ, the most popular instant messaging software in the world at that time, and its owner was AOL. Therefore, AOL would not easily allow Tencent to use the name OICQ.

When Ma Huateng saw the first lawyer's letter, he thought it was just a simple statement and didn't pay much attention to it.Immediately afterwards, the other party sent a very thick letter by mail, and the lawsuit was formally filed. AOL is very domineering, and said in the lawyer's letter, "Now there is already a case, which is smsicq, and AOL won. This is a case that the judge can compare. Logically, you will definitely lose. I advise you to cancel the domain name as soon as possible. Don't Let's fight." Faced with such a powerful AOL, Ma Huateng and his team approached IDG and asked them to find a lawyer to respond to the lawsuit.According to the NAF (National Arbitration Forum) arbitration statement, Tencent has made a reply to AOL's allegations.At the arbitration meeting, the two lawyers represented AOL and Tencent respectively in the arbitration defense.

Tencent clearly pointed out that AOL did not register "OICQ" in the United States at that time, nor did it register in China.AOL accused Tencent of malicious registration, and has been trying to replace "oicq" by registering "0icq" and replacing the letter "o" with the number "0". oicq.org".This accusation by Tencent is also supported by time. The time when AOL registered www.oicq.org was February 3, 2000, and the time when the indictment was formally submitted to the NAF (National Arbitration Forum) in Minnesota, USA was March 3, exactly one month apart.

This is a lawsuit without any suspense, and Tencent lost.On March 21, 2000, the legal documents came into effect, and the arbitrator James Carmody signed the arbitration judgment, ruling that Tencent should return the oicq.com and oicq.net domain names to AOL.And Tencent, which was under pressure, deliberately caused a situation where thousands of people were disconnected.Since then, Tencent has stopped the use of this domain name. Seeing the brand that has been painstakingly managed for more than a year in vain, Tencent tasted the taste of the defendant for the first time.Ma Huateng had no choice but to temporarily activate the new domain names—tencent.com and tencent.net.For two full years since then, Tencent has been using the tencent.com domain name as its main website entrance.

Regarding the name change of OICQ, some experts pointed out earlier that since ICQ is a registered trademark of AOL, any similar software that uses the word ICQ in its name has the risk of violating the right to use AOL's trademark.But OICQ, which was in the limelight, was not moved at all at that time, and had to react until the other party came to the door.Even after the name change of OICQ, Tencent still insisted: "The name change is our voluntary decision, without interference from other external factors, but it is still in the transition period, and the name of OICQ is still used for various external businesses. By this year (2001 years) will change completely later.”

Soon, attentive users found Tencent's complete change when downloading version 0325. The official name changed from "OICQ2000" to "QQ2000", and the OICQ on the main menu button at the bottom left of the software panel also changed to " QQ2000", not only that, the name of the executable file has also changed from oicq.exe to "qq2000b.exe". A small change has avoided the deeper legal conflict between Tencent and AOL.For Ma Huateng, it is quite gratifying: QQ users have not responded to this change. Netizens accepted OICQ's name change as a matter of course, and then, many netizens discovered that the QQ profile picture had also changed.One changed the name, the other changed the face.What prompted Ma Huateng to make so many changes? One of the news at the time was that Haihong Holdings in mainland China reached an agreement with Disney to be responsible for the development and operation of the Chinese version of the Disney website.Therefore, the industry speculates that Tencent's face-changing has a lot to do with the cooperation between Haihong and Disney.In the QQ0325 version, Tencent’s chat avatars, well-known cartoon portraits such as Donald Duck, Garfield, Kitty, Pikachu, Popeye, Tom the Cat, Smurfs, Snoopy, Sonic the Hedgehog, etc. have all disappeared, replaced by A cartoon portrait designed and produced by Tencent itself.By changing his face, Ma Huateng cleared the "time bomb" in Tencent's development process, because the classic avatars used before, such as Pikachu, Garfield, Donald Duck, Smurfs, Tommy Cat, etc., did not get their owners - Disney. authorized.Some netizens joked that if this "time bomb" explodes, its destructive power can be imagined. Once the other party files a claim for infringement, I am afraid that Tencent will not be able to afford to insert a grassroots bid for itself.