The Day Someone Else Owned Nerdcore

You put years into something. Your obsessions, your time, the specific texture of your personality expressed through hundreds of posts about Star Wars and zombies and music and everything strange worth paying attention to—and then a company with lawyers shows up and takes the domain out from under you, and suddenly the name you built belongs to them.

That’s what happened to René, the man behind Nerdcore, one of the best geek-culture blogs in the German-speaking internet. At some point he called the firm Euroweb "assholes"—the German word was Arschgeigen, which translates literally as "ass violins" and functionally as something like "pompous, useless idiots"—and Euroweb took legal exception to this. They sent a cease-and-desist. René ignored it, in the grand tradition of bloggers who’ve built their entire identity around not caring what corporations think. And now nerdcore.de belongs to Euroweb. By what exact mechanism—what judgment, what sequence of filings—nobody outside the two parties seems to know for certain.

René’s response on Twitter was cryptic even by blogger standards: To be clear: Euroweb is right and that’s all justiciable whatever and it will be GREAT! Which could mean anything from genuine capitulation to an elaborate setup for something else. I have no idea, and I suspect the ambiguity is deliberate.

As someone who has spent years building something online and understands viscerally what a domain represents—not just an address but an identity, an archive, years of accumulated context—I find the whole thing quietly nauseating. The idea that calling a company what it probably is can cost you the name you’ve been building under feels like exactly the kind of legal leverage that shouldn’t work but does. If someone took this journal’s domain, I would not be cryptic on Twitter about it.

Until things resolve, Nerdcore is at Crackajack. A temporary solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist.