Nissan Vs Nissan Is The Bizarre 18-Year-Old Corporate Battle You've Probably Never Heard Of

Nissan UK has dropped a bit of a clanger in tweeting a URL belonging to a man who hates Nissan.

In tweeting about the unveiling of the new Leaf electric hatchback, some unfortunate soul at Nissan tweeted a link to nissan.com/nissan, which is a domain that has been the subject of expensive and deeply acrimonious lawsuits for almost two decades. The tweet was deleted a few hours later, presumably to the sound of panicked screaming.

In short, nissan.com belongs to one Uzi Nissan, an Israeli man who moved to the USA in 1976, setting up his first business in 1980 servicing non-American cars. He called it Nissan Foreign Car, and since then has set up a number of other businesses using his name, culminating in Nissan Computer Corporation, which registered nissan.com in 1994.

Five years later, Nissan Motor tried to take it from him by force… and (eventually) lost. The saga is still ongoing, with Nissan Motor apparently attempting to trademark the Nissan name in various areas of computing, in what seems to be an attempt to strangle Nissan Computer Corp’s future operations and to force the company into handing over the domain.

While we can’t claim to have done much of the legwork, here, we feel this is such a bizarre story that we’ve got to invite you to look at Jalopnik’s piece here. It’s fascinating, barely believable stuff.