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SourceArbitration board rules military games operator can keep his domain name.
February 6, 2007
By Alexandra Berzon
A well-publicized saga over the fate of the Wargames.com domain name concluded Tuesday when an arbitration board ruled against MGM, allowing a military games seller to continue operating his Web site under its current name.
MGM had filed a complaint in December arguing the studio owned the rights to Wargames.com based on the popular 1983 film, which featured a young Matthew Broderick as a hacker who almost starts a world war via his computer. The studio is planning a much-later sequel with cyber-terrorists taking the place of the Russian military.
The complaint was one of thousands of domain name disputes filed last year, many of which were never challenged. MGM recently won cases to win back Pink Panther and Rocky Web sites, according to the National Arbitration Forum. In both those cases, the domain name owners never filed briefs to represent their side, and the names were given back to MGM.
Last week, a panel ruled against a swine company that was trying to take the pig.com domain name on the basis that they owned the trademark for PIG. The judges ruled that the pig.com website was based on the dictionary definition of âpigâ, not the New Pig Corporationâs trademark.
In the case of wargames.com, MGM was up against Rogers Cadenhead, an Internet publisher who claimed he legitimately bought wargames.com to start a business selling military games.
âTo me, if you go to a site called wargames.com, you expect to find war games. I donât think you expect to find a 24-year-old film, but then again Iâm a big geek,â said Mr. Cadenhead, who told the court his enthusiasm runs so deep he once invented and sold a war-themed game that was never published.
A lawyer for MGM did not respond to calls for comment.
Mr. Cadenhead said he owns upwards of 60 domain names that heâs bought with plans to publish, not sell. That includes names like drudge.com, which he publishes as The Drudge Retort, a parody and counter to the popular Drudge Report. He also bought BenedictXVI .com, a name he donated to charity after seeing hundreds of thousands of hits the day the new pope announced his new name.
MGM filed Wargames as a trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office three years after Mr. Cadenhead bought the domain name for wargames.com. Even so, the arbitration panel ruled, MGM could still have the rights to the name if it could show Mr. Cadenhead was cyber-squattingâbuying up domain names based on another companyâs products or names, only to sell them. Thatâs against the law.
And Mr. Cadenhead looked vulnerable. He didnât begin operating a military games Web site on wargames.com until after he received a letter from MGM demanding that he give back the name, although he submitted evidence to the court claiming to prove he had been developing the site for several years. He had also registered names for Rocky sequel movies on the same day the sequels were announced, which looked suspicious. He told the court he did that only to prevent them from getting in the hands of porn producers and gave those names to MGM as soon as the studio asked for them.
After receiving hundreds of pages of documents, the National Arbitration Forum decided Mr. Cadenhead had produced sufficient evidence to show that he legitimately wanted to use the site for his own purposesâand not just to trade off the popularity of the Wargames movie.
âThe picture that emerges from this material is of the Respondent, having seen Complainantâs WARGAMES movie as a teenagerâ¦and having developed a professional interest in computer programming and wargamesâ¦registered the disputed domainâ¦with the idea of one day using it to sell wargames over the Internet,â wrote the Forum panel.
Mr. Cadenhead has written numerous books on computer programming, and he said his next book is going to be about the domain name dispute process. He ended up spending $5,000 fighting the dispute, but with all the free publicity heâs earned (4,791 links to wargames.com since the case was filed in December) heâs posed to make that back.
âI was holding onto the site until I really liked it and was ready to completely launch it, but in retrospect I would have put it online, even half-assed, and worked on it in real time,â said Mr. Cadenhead.