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June 16, 2000 VOL. 29 NO. 23 | SEARCH ASIAWEEK Love Vs. Money Celebs want their URLs back PLUS: Quick guide to the latest fansites Financial issues are often the most contentious in any relationship, and so it is between celebrities and their admirers. Now that entertainers can hear the "ka-ching!" of the Internet, they are wresting valuable Web addresses away from well-meaning fans whose only mistake may have been setting up sites devoted to their heros. The little people are losing. Courts have long recognized that a celebrity's face and good name is his fortune, and cannot be appropriated without authorization. American film actress Julia Roberts had little trouble recently reclaiming the URL www.juliaroberts.com from a "cyber-squatter" -- someone who registers a sought-after Web address to sell it to the highest bidder. Likewise, managers for golfer Pak Se Ri of South Korea succeeded in shutting down a fansite because it had an official-sounding URL. "We are careful about what our athletes are associated with," says Joseph Kolina of IMG, Pak's management company. "The poor performance of a website could be construed as failure on the part of the talent." Some amateur sites provide harmless publicity, but there is also a chance that professional images will be tarnished. The unauthorized www.shuqi.com, for example, features soft-porn photos of actress Shu Qi that she may wish to forget. The unofficial www.leonlai.com has illegally uploaded sound files from all of singer Leon Lai's major albums. A boom in Asian fansites will likely produce more domain-name disputes. That doesn't worry C.R. Venkatesh, who built an online tribute to India's ex-Miss World, Aishwarya Rai. Venkatesh, a 27-year-old Indian engineer, says he did so because "Aishwarya Rai is an angel." He has since been offered up to $25,000 for the address. No sale. Venkatesh is keeping it to launch a show business portal. Fansites
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