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Pfizer, the drugs company that so improved humankind's lot by inventing Viagra, this month succeeded in preventing a porn web site from using the address www.viagrafalls.com. Jon and Cherie Messner, the operators of the Wetlands site, have agreed to stop using the name, which is just one of more than 100 different web addresses they use to redirect web users to the site. This is somewhat ironic, given the complementary nature of the products. Of course, Pfizer does have a right to prevent others from benefiting from the name of a product it has spent a lot of money developing and marketing. But the battle might just be starting for Pfizer - and for many other companies with trademarks and brands. Rather than celebrating a victory, Pfizer and its lawyers might now want to turn their attention to the Turkish porn site KingSex, which is using the name viagra sex.com to attract visitors. And then there are the hundreds of web sites that offer to sell Viagra, such as ConfiMed (www.viagraguys.com). Domain names (that's the bit before the .com or .org or .co.uk on your web or email address) are how people find you, and how they know they are getting your quality product and not some cheapo imitation. But internet address names can be used against you in other ways. For example, Jim Nichol, who runs a company called Domains For Sale, has registered viagrasucks.com. The name is not active, but its owner, it seems, expects to be able to sell it to someone who will use it. Viagra is not the only victim. There's a thriving site called walmartsucks.com. Dishonest.com is about Bill Clinton. Microsnot.com is defunct, but the invective-filled come.to/microsoft is still up and running. Internet domain naming is far from a clear-cut field. It is worth thinking carefully before sending in the legal shock troops. Take www.gner.net, which most people would expect to have been about the privatised rail company GNER. Except, the address and site were owned by York-based internet agency port80, and the site made it clear that the acronym stood for 'Getting nowhere early or reliably'. A few legal letters later, and the site has been moved to delayed.net. That's all very well for GNER, except that its action probably generated more publicity and traffic for the site than port80 could have mustered alone. Colgate-Palmolive had to make an embarrassing climb-down back in October after it demanded that the owners of www.ajax.org surrender the name. Benjamin Kite, the owner of ajax.org, is convinced that an internet campaign he organised, complete with petition, a consumer boycott and a lot of publicity casting the corporation in the role of bully, won the day for him and the site, which he says was created "for no commercial purposes, but rather for the free exchange of information, ideas, and cool pictures of Bill Gates dressed up like Hitler". "I suggest that you dig up Sophocles and Ovid and sue them, since they have written poems and plays bearing the same name," said Kite in a letter to Colgate-Palmolive lawyer Brett Parker, which he then published on the site. He went on: "I also suggest you take a look at your local phone book and harass the owners of Ajax Roofing, Ajax Air Filter and Supply, Ajax Air Freight, Ajax Chemical Toilets ..." Perhaps what Colgate-Palmolive saw looming was the kind of embarrassment suffered by the Prema Toy Company when it sent in the lawyers to recover the pokey. org address owned by 12 year-old Chris van Allen, whose nickname happens to be Pokey and who had been given the domain by his parents as a birthday present. A PR disaster was only defused after the intervention of Art Clokey, creator of the clay animation characters Gumby and Pokey, who instructed the lawyers to back off and gave the Van Allens the name.