Recently the Internet domain registrar, GoDaddy had its Oscar-worthy moment, winning against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (\u2018Academy\u2019 for brevity). The Academy had accused the Scottsdale, Arizona based company of cyber squatting.<\/p>\n
Originally filed in 2010, the lawsuit was filed by the Academy, stating that GoDaddy was allowing its customers “to \u201cpark\u201d their pages and\u00a0 share in the revenue” collected from the advertisements on the said pages. Further the Academy stated that the internet domain registrar had allowed its customers to purchase a total of 293 domain names like academyawards.net, oscarsredcarpet.com, billycrystal2012oscars.com etc, making unauthorized profits off the Academy\u2019s trademarks.<\/p>\n
The law suit that stretched for almost half a decade had a story quite like the movies. Earlier on in the case, the had Academy prevailed, showing that more than 80 percent of the domain names were confusingly or deceptively similar their trademarks. The odds seemed to be\u00a0against GoDaddy. Being the underdog in this case, the only defense left with it was that of good faith. It stated that websites like \u201cacademyawardbuzz.com\u201d did not generate large sums of money, besides a diminutive amount of a few hundred dollars. Thus, no substantial quantitative loss was demonstrated.<\/p>\n
Favoring GoDaddy, the District Court stated that the Academy had \u201cfailed to produce any evidence that GoDaddy possessed subjective bad faith intent to profit off of the AMPAS Marks\u201d. Further the Court said that \u201cbefore enrolling any domain (including the 293 Accused Domains) in its Parked Pages Program, GoDaddy required the registrant to: (1) certify his or her right to use the domain without infringing any third-party marks or violating any state or federal law\u201d. It stated\u00a0 that Go Daddy had reason to rely on the representation made by its customers, that any registrations made by them was not infringing on a third party\u2019s trademarks. Also, any trademark infringement that had occurred due to GoDaddy\u2019s use of domain names that were confusingly similar to the Academy\u2019s trademarks through its automated processes, was not intentional. The Court also recognized the fact that GoDaddy played an active role in protecting third party marks. According to its trademark policy any trademark holder could report an incident of cybersquatting, after which GoDaddy would remove all advertisements from the concerned domain.<\/p>\n
The District Court said that the problem or the reason the Academy lost was its faulty \u201ctheory of liability under the Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act\u201d. The nature of the claims put forward by the Academy were such that if allowed, they would have \u201cimposed upon GoDaddy the unprecedented duty to act as the internet\u2019s trademark police. The ACPA did not impose such sweeping obligations.\u201d<\/p>\n
The law suit was an important decision with respect to cyber squatting. The Academy was hoping to win $30 million dollars in damages.<\/p>\n
Authored by Anchita Sharma<\/p>\n
Sources- here,<\/a> here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently the Internet domain registrar, GoDaddy had its Oscar-worthy moment, winning against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (\u2018Academy\u2019 for brevity). The Academy had accused the Scottsdale, Arizona based company of cyber squatting. Originally filed in 2010, the lawsuit was filed by the Academy, stating that GoDaddy was allowing its customers “to \u201cpark\u201d … Continue reading “And the lawsuit goes to….”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":12,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,11],"tags":[532,533,110,234],"class_list":["post-27021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intellectual-property","category-trademarks","tag-acacdemy-of-motion-picture-art-and-sciences","tag-cyber-squatting","tag-intellectual-property-law-2","tag-trademarks-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27021"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129766,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27021\/revisions\/129766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}