Someone has registered the Triptych Continuum as a corporate entity. (Hint: it wasn't me.) · 4:28pm Feb 3rd, 2018
I'm not sure what they expect to get out of it. I really don't know what they expect to get out of me.
I know what domain squatting is and understand how some people would want to get their ideal URL in their own hands. But... forming a (hollow) shell corporation? For fanfic? Given the time of registration, I'd have a pretty good case for hostile grabbing in court (assuming such could ever help me), also known as 'a list of my publication dates'. And even then... what are they expecting me to do, that I'd be willingly giving them money to disband? Because the name is a little too specific to be coincidence.
I suppose it could be that one artist and if so, that's fine. But otherwise...
Is there a program just roaming through Google and registering any available term as a just-in-case? How many people are being hit by this? Is there a Fallout Equestria corporation? What is this entity paying to register all these false corporations? And why?
The address in question is residential. A quick search engine run discovered multiple businesses operating out of that location.
Does anyone have any idea what's going on here?
And for those authors reading this who have a 'verse of their own: this may be a really good time to look up its name -- followed by 'Inc.' Just in case.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there was some kind of bot doing this. And, I mean, it’s not illegal. It’s a piss-poor use of resources, bad business strategy, and unsportsmanlike, but not illegal.
It’s confusing as hell, too. Like, what, is the plan to register the domain and then sue anyone using that name for using it out of license? Trademark law doesn’t work that way.
How did you discover this?
4788584
I do a quick Google peek once a month to see if anyone's talking about things off-site. (Loss of the exact incoming URLs in the Referrals column stung.) This is the first time that result came up.
Shell companies? Fronts for illegal activity? When you step past the land mines in the yard and trip wires at the porch, peek through a crack in the thick drapes into an empty room. Maybe...
As long as it isn't your characters preparing to sue you for what you put them through, I think you'll be okay.
4788580
Are there other ways someone could use this for shutting Estee down, stealing and publishing their work, some other way to file a lawsuit? Could Hasbro be behind this? I hate being so negative, but in the era of Trump, Inc, seems anything is possible.
I'm just wondering what kind of company this could even be. This is so...specific. Surely if you're going to all the trouble of registering a domain and creating a website for your company, you'd check to make sure the name wasn't already in use. I mean, seriously? What do they sell? Compelling narratives??
I'm betting it's a coincidence. Granted, a strange one, but it's not like you made up either of those words.
4788594
Hasbro’s legal team would have specifically advised against this because they would lose any lawsuit they filed. FiM Fiction still exists: The only grounds that Hasbro would have to sue would be protecting trademark, but since FiM Fiction has been around since 2011, that would mean they spent the intervening time not protecting trademark, which would immediately put them at risk of losing trademark. The wealth they could extract from Estee is minimal compared to the total value of the trademark. Letting Estee — and in fact, all of us — do as she has been is, in fact, the best way to protect trademark at this time.
As for the rest, I suppose someone could post stories through the URL to try and pull traffic and ad revenue there, but the amount of revenue may not even cover hosting costs in that case.
If I were to guess, I would say it’s a boy that registered untalented domain names based on crawl results, so that a human can review them later just in case any of them might be worth something. It’s functionally the same as crypto mining: A relatively easy way to make a tiny bit of money at the much greater expense of someone else.
Oddly enough, you're not the only Triptych. Even here at Fimmfiction there are 2 others. All I can advise is
1)Under no circumstances whatsoever sign anything or admit anything in writing
2)You haven't done anything illegal. So, if anyone contacts you personally, record it if at all possible & contact the police AT ONCE.
4788598
Isn't that what authors do for a living?
4788627
Yea but a whole company of authors? I guess that would just be a publishing house.
4788587 I hit a similar WTF moment when playing around with my Equestrians on Earth fic, Farmer Bruener Has Some Ponies. I've got a human character named Claire Bruener who has a blog, so out of curiosity, I poked the title "Claire Out There" and found out the URL can be purchased for the low, low price of X if I want to buy it away from the robo-register who gobbled it up. So I settled for collecting a Google Mail address for her, and a Blogspot blog, both of which were available and free. If I really wanted to go whole hog, I'd snarf up the Instagram/Facebook/etc... registrations, but I'm lazy.
This seems like a development from an Estee story. Like somepony in Manehattan setting up Elements of Harmony Inc. as part of an incredibly vaguely defined plan to somehow profit from the Bearers and their actions, that would make the Underpants Gnomes shake their heads and mutter about half-baked business ideas.
4788714
Can we just take a moment to imagine the look on Celestia's face as a pony stands in front of her in court, arguing to her that the crown owes his company royalties for every time the Bearers have saved the world?
4788632
Lots of shady domain registrar's will register the site the instant you search for it.
Poking around a bit, the only google results cached in a reasonable period of time before that registration were TVTropes and Aorts mentioning you on the OotS forums, but it seems like mining either forums or TVTropes for proper nouns and registering them by bot would be... not very successful. My first guess would be a bot mining data from Patreon links, maybe? The only problem with that is that I only really see
threefour companies registered at that address and it's a house (or, apartment in a house). Typically those sorts of bot companies set up mail forwarding at some dirt cheap office space in a dead strip mall in the mid-west, not a house in NY.I found a potential name and phone number for one of the companies and the individual in question (who I'm not gonna name here, of course) *does* seem to have an arrest for forgery/larceny a few years back, but that's the only thing of note. That looks like a relatively minor thing, even; probably a forged signature on a low value cheque or something.
Plus, that might not even be the same person, given that it's potentially an apartment.Edit: The arrest record has the right name and right approximate age for the property owner, so probably it is the same person. It is 100% a 4-unit apartment though, and oddly, the Triptych company is the only one of the companies at that address not explicitly registered in the name of one of the two property owners, so that one might be a renter and unrelated to the above.That's about all I see so I'm actually gonna go with this just being an unlikely collision of names that has nothing to do with you, unless the individual in question happens to be a reader/knows you by some other means.
4788731 Ah, the joy of the internet. :)
Maybe someone here likes the name and is using it for an unrelated business?
Apparently, your biggest competitor is "Kew Gardens." Do we know what a Kew is?
4788741
Kew Gardens? As in The London Botanical Gardens?
If they are trying to register a domain for that, they must be kinda stupid...
Probably bot, or someone who picked it up in hopes to sell it to you at a later price. Though to be frank it is a cool name, maybe the name of a future art gallery. I mean it is New York after all.
I think I got it!
https://www.discogs.com/Quicksand-Interiors/release/11117754
So, the band I just linked to released an album on Nov. 10, 2017, 1 week after the Triptych Continuum company registered. Note that the Triptych company is listed as an affiliated publisher for the album in question. Also note that one of the minor credits for the album happens to be the owner of the property where the company was registered at. Said individual works at a business consulting firm, who presumably worked as a consultant for some boring businessy stuff related to the album release. This also explains the multiple companies registered at the same address. Why the name, though? Well...
Note that the band broke up twice and this is the third incarnation of the group... but still containing the original members. Hence, "Triptych Continuum" as the name for the publishing affiliate set up by the consultant for release of the album.
Boom. Complete ridiculous coincidence.
That was surprisingly fun to puzzle out!
4788797
Occam's Razor strikes again.
4788714
Even better, have it be Murdocks' lawyers, with Wordia covering it for her paper.
4788590
Indeed.
Though if that were the case, I'd start pointing fingers at Ratchette.
4788797
Welp, so much for paranoia.
My guess was going to be "prospective software company", just off a gut feeling.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Somebody%27s+Watching+Me+Music+Video&&view=detail&mid=5E404D1D3093F84F0D725E404D1D3093F84F0D72&&FORM=VDRVRV