Posted on 06/19/2003 12:31:52 PM PDT by moses773
Just hours after she was indicted, Martha Stewart launched MarthaTalks.com, a website aimed at bringing her side of the story to the masses in a controlled platform. Although the web is an amazing marketing and PR tool, it also shows how easilly it could backfire. Hours after the original site was published, someone registered the domain name MarthaStewartTalks.com & posted a rather unflattering parody of her original site. They are obviously counting on traffic meant for Martha's legitimate website & it seems to be working.
The operators of the site claim to have had over 5 million visits, roughly a third of the visitorship Martha's site claims to have had. Repatriation is available under the new Uniform Domain Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) administered by ICANN (http://icann.org/udrp/udrp.htm) and provides a binding arbitration-like proceeding whereby trademark owners can obtain ownership of domain names which are identical or confusingly similar to the subject trademark and were registered in bad faith by others with no legitimate interest in the name. The UDRP requires that the cybersquatter is actually using the domain name, as opposed to just registering it. A trademark owner can prevail in a cybersquatting action by showing that the defendant, in bad faith and with intent to profit, registered a domain name consisting of the plaintiff's distinctive trademark. Factors to determine whether bad faith exists are the extent to which the domain name contains the registrant's legal name, prior use of the domain name in connection with the sale of goods and services, intent to divert customers from one site to another and use of false registration information and the registrant's offer to sell the domain name back to the trademark owner for more than out-of -pocket expenses.
The operators of MarthaStewartTalks.com seem to be getting away with this because they are not profiting from use of the name, are actually using the domain & have not offered it for sale. Martha's legal team could bring legal action against the operators of the site. However, legal action could make matters worse should the operators of the domain in dispute use their platform to post the details of such a suit on their already popular website to embarass Martha Stewart further.
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