WIPO rules in favor of free speech over trademark

In a rather interesting domain dispute, the Sutherland Institute, a right-wing think tank, accused the registrants of sutherlandinstitute.com of cybersquatting. The actual website of the institute is sutherlandinstitute.org. The respondents used the .com top-level domain to run an protest site they claimed was a parody of the real Sutherland Institute.

Although the institute was able to demonstrate that they owned the right to the name and that it was confusingly similar to their trademark, the WIPO was reluctant to rule that it was registered in bad faith. Their reasoning is that the laws of free speech in the United States protect individuals and organizations from prosecution when they are offering protest or parody.

“Because this proceeding involves political speech that is strongly protected under the US Constitution, the Panel will not in these proceedings involving two US parties attempt to identify bad faith elements that are not specifically enumerated in the Policy,” said the WIPO ruling. “If the right of political speech is to be interfered with based upon [the Institute’s] service mark incorporated in [the parody site’s] disputed domain name, it is preferable that a federal or state court make that application of the concept of ‘bad faith’.”

Source: Out-Law.com
Photo: Flickr