Nominet panelist adopts the willing suspension of disbelief in giving credit to respondent’s version as to why scoobydoo.co.uk is a legitimate fan site and not an attempt to profit off the name.  Just ignore the fact that he sold merchandise from the site (before the demand letter), and the fact that he offered to sell the name for a lot of money to Hanna Barbera.  But you have to ignore reality to enjoy the show as well.

Coca-Cola, Pepsi, the Washington Post and McDonalds moved for a TRO and Preliminary Injunction against William Purdy, an anti-abortion activits, who registered various domain names incorporating plaintiffs’ names, pointing them to anti-abortion information (including fund-raising information).  See July 16 entry below for more background.  Now plaintiffs have been granted the TRO and the injunction and have been awarded transfer of the names.  The District of Minnesota decision is framed so you will have to use Court Web and enter ‘Coca-Cola’ as the search term to access the text.

See this cnn.com story.

New organizations have come out in favor of spam, via The Onion. [irony indicator on].

Check out this picture of a gas station sign.  The station owner, oddly, sells SHELL gas AND its own brand (somewhat unusual).  In addition to the franchisor/franchisee issues discussed in the law.com article, what we may have here possibly is a rare real-world case of Initial Interest Confusion, where the copying of a mark brings the customer to the product, but circumstances dispel confusion before purchase.  Here, the SHELL sign brings the customer into the station, but the sign on the pump (and the lower price) alleviate confusion.  Of course here the gas station owner is allowed to display the SHELL mark – but does that sign imply that all his gas is SHELL-brand?

Initial Interest Confusion was a key concept in the MOVIEBUFF and EPIX decisions.  The MOVIEBUFF court in fact used (tortuous to my mind) analogies of  domain names acting like misleading signs on the road inducing motorists to get off at wrong exits (and then sticking around to buy something).  Well, now they have a real-world demonstration of the analogy.

Thanks to Joel for pointing this one out to me.

Everything about linking from Searchenginewatch.com via Politech.

Politechbot via ICANNwatch on the case of William Purdy and what looks to be another domain name as free speech case. An anti-abortion advocate is apparently registering what are described as names similar or identical to the names of newspapers.  The registrant re-directs traffic to anti-abortion sites.

I disagree with the author’s final sentence, that ACPA wasn’t designed to handle this.  The Lanham Act deals with the use of trademarks in the context of free speech and the caselaw is clear.  Political speech is not an absolute defense to the deceptive use of a trademark.

These names are or are not confusingly similar to the trademarks of others, the registrant does or does not have legitimate interests in registering those names (which is different from the legitimate interest in making political speech), and he does or does not seek to divert traffic from the trademark owners.  I acknowledge that the UDRP might not necessarily be appropriate for a complex case because of its limited record, but the ACPA can handle this.

UPDATE: Politechbot carries a list of the domain names in question along with a post from Purdy.

This from the Washington Post about two groups fighting over the name Minority Business RoundTable.  Trademark disputes are not limited to for-profit enterprises.