The mtv.com thing is correct. He was working for MTV at the time, then left and kept building the web pages. There wasn't then a precedent about domain names being connected to trademarks. I don't remember Madam Furry.

WAIS has an interesting connection to the Internet Archive.

Long before the Internet Yellow Pages, we used Scott Yanoff's Internet services list. That's how I found out about the WWW. Also there was a big list of sites that allowed anonymous FTP.