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(or, The Diary of a Confessed Caffeine Abuser)
The Good Guys Win One
A sneaky cybersquatter gets squashed
By David "Spam Me and Die" Fiedler
Ha!
I don't usually prowl around legal Web sites.
But I was alerted to a cybersquatting story, and this one turned out to be more interesting than I thought.
According to the New York Law Journal, a company called Omega started about five years ago selling pilot supplies on the Web, and registered the domain name of "sportys.com". However, the entity known in the aviation field as "Sporty's" has been in business for quite a bit longer than the Internet has been around, and it's a different company (Sportsman's Market is their legal name, though they own the Sporty's trademark since 1985).
Perhaps sensing that it would need a better reason to be caught running around with one of its competitors' trademarks as a domain name, Omega sold the sportys.com to a Christmas tree farm called Sporty's Farm.
This might have been the end of the whole thing, keeping the potentially lucrative sportys.com domain away from the "real" Sporty's, except for one thing: Omega owned the Christmas tree farm too!
If they had just been a bit more clever, it might have worked. Instead, the U.S. Court of Appeals (Second Circuit) found in the "real" Sporty's favor, and they got the domain name. The only criticism I have is that the court did not award any damages to Sportsman's Market. I cannot see how the apparently quite deliberate actions of Omega do not constitute enough "cybersquatting" for damages! Isn't that why they passed the law in the first place? More to the point, the aggrieved party certainly went through a great amount of stress, worry, and legal costs for something they shouldn't even have had to worry about.
As a pilot, I'm quite familiar with the Sporty's catalogs...in fact, their marketing department is so good, I suspect anyone who ever got within 50 yards of a Cessna is on their mailing list! I'm glad they won their rightful domain. Happy landings!
-- D. Fiedler
David Fiedler is Editor-in-Chief of WebDeveloper.com®, and his opinions are definitely his own.
Last modified: Thu Jun 15 06:18:43 EDT 2000
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