PATON: Colorado no stranger to Web domain disputes

By James Paton, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published January 16, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Vail Resorts, Crocs, Young Life and Allos Therapeutics probably have nothing in common other than a Colorado mailing address, but they have shared a similar experience. Each has filed a domain name dispute in the past year.

Conflicts over Web addresses are on the rise. One organization dealing with the cases, the National Arbitration Forum, handled 1,658 disputes in 2006, a 21 percent increase from the prior year, and next month expects to report a gain for 2007.

Colorado examples abound:

* Young Life, the Christian nonprofit in Colorado Springs, discovered that someone had acquired younglife.nu to draw Internet users to a Web site filled with "hard-core" pornography, according to a complaint filed last year with the World Intellectual Property Organization.

* Focus on the Family, the Young Life neighbor led by James Dobson, can relate. The ministry in 2005 said an entity in Turkey had infringed on the trademark for its Indonesian affiliate, Fokus Pada Keluarga, after the site registration inadvertently lapsed. The site's owner charged users for "adult-oriented material," the nonprofit said.

* Vail Resorts owns vail.com, beavercreek.com and other sites but had not locked up vailresortvacations.com or beavercreekreservations.com. The owner of those addresses, Resort Destination Marketing, once had a pact with Vail to help book vacations. But it does not have the rights to the domains, according to Vail, which said it spends more than $20 million a year promoting its trademarks. The marketing company argued that the "terms are geographically descriptive and have a limited trademark value."

A panel of arbitrators ultimately declined to transfer the names from the company to Vail, saying the conflict is not the type of dispute it was set up to handle. Vail is likely to persist, however, by taking it to court.

"We're disappointed in the outcome and weighing our options," Vail spokeswoman Kelly Ladyga said. "We feel RDM capitalized on the good will of our trademarks" and its use of the names "caused confusion in the marketplace."

* Niwot-based Crocs filed complaints last year against the owners of crocsshoes.com and crocsshoes.us and easily convinced an arbitrator that it deserved to have those names. In the first case, Chadd Chustz used the Web site to sell Crocs shoes as well as competitors' products, according to the filings. While Chustz was an "authorized reseller" for Crocs, he had no right to use the trademark, the company said.

* Allos Therapeutics, the pharmaceutical company in Westminster, recently secured allostherapeutics.com after arguing that a cyber-squatter had hijacked its name. The owner, Kumar Patel, had said Allos tried to buy the domain from him in March 2007 "via a fictitious e-mail address," but he was unwilling to sell.

Nene, the Denver Nuggets forward, and Colorado Mountain Junior College, also have fought to get domain names.

Victoria's Secret in 2006 went after a Denver woman who grabbed victoriaslilsecret.com, claiming that she used the site to lead people to an online escort service. The woman failed to respond to the complaint, and the domain name was transferred to the company.

And Hunter S. Thompson's Denver lawyers took action after the author died in 2005, eventually wresting huntersthompson.com from the man who registered the site. They cited an online article in which Mitchell Moore expressed a desire to trade the name for a signed copy of Thompson's book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

James Paton and David Milstead take turns writing Up and Down 17th Street. Contact Paton at patonj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2544.

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