This might be a bit long. I apologize for that but I want to explain the situation and hopefully, someone at GFY can give me some advice/pointers about this.
There's a free mainstream site that has been taken down about a year ago. I felt that the site was entertaining and resourceful. The owner basically just disappeared.
Now, to my knowledge, this guy never owned an actual domain. His site was done on some subdomain.
I recently purchased a domain name. That name of that domain is the same as the online nickname that guy was using. He was also using a logo on his site.
My idea, to a degree, is to "resurrect" that site with similar information and content. Obviously with updated features.
Now, what I would like to know is in that situation, could I somehow appropriate the logo for that new domain? To the best of my knowledge, he held no copyright and/or trademark to either name or logo. In fact, even looking at archive.org, there's no indication of a "©", "?" or whatever. It was after all, an amateur mainstream site.
What could/should be done?
