The BBC has threatened a group of US EastEnders fans with legal action after they set up a website to campaign for more of their favourite soap.
Fans campaigning to be able to watch the soap at weekends set up a site at www.bbcamerica.us - a web address the corporation had failed to register.
The campaigners, who complained in their hundreds after the soap was dropped from its usual time to make way for lifestyle programmes such as Changing Rooms, have already succeeded in getting the show moved back to a weekend slot.
But the climbdown has not been enough to placate devotees of the show, who have already gathered 1,200 names on a new petition on their website demanding that EastEnders is returned to its original berth on Sunday afternoon.
Now BBC America, a cable channel launched in 1999 to showcase BBC programmes in the US and now has 26m subscribers, has written to the protesters threatening to sue over their website.
BBC lawyers have demanded they hand over the domain name and stop using the company's logo.
"We request that you take prompt steps to prevent further confusion and damage to our client's valuable rights in its trademark," say the corporation's US lawyers. They go on to claim that the site deliberately tries to con visitors into thinking that it is an official site.
It is not the first time the BBC has come unstuck by failing to register domain names relating to the corporation. In 1999, it was forced to spend £200,000 buying the domain name bbc.com from Boston computing firm Boston Business Computing.
Over the years the BBC is estimated to have spent more than £1m of licence fee payers' money trying to shut down sites with the corporation's name.
Not all of its attempts were successful with some, such as Canadian computer company Big Blue and Cousins, hanging on to their site. The company registered the domain name www.bbc.org in 1995 and has steadfastly refused to sell or hand it over.
Neither does the BBC seem to have learned its lesson, with its new digital terrestrial venture Freeview liable to run into similar problems. The domain name Freeview.com has been used since 1996 by a US web development firm while Freeview.co.uk is still available.
