The 1999 US Anticybersquatting act provides protection to the owner of a US registered trade mark. However, to invoke the act the plaintiff has to prove that the "squatter" is acting in bad faith. This means that they intend to profit from the site or are simply sitting on a name, which is also deemed to be an act of bad faith.
Ravi Azim-Khan, head of the e-commerce group at McDermot, Will and Emery, thinks that a Scottish company like Planet Scotland would probably win a counter-suit against the IOC class action in Scotland. Azim-Khan cites the precedent of a UK clothing company French Connection, which tried to retrieve the domain name FCUK.com, which belonged to an IT consultancy. In this case a judge ruled against French Connection because the FCUK.com was not trying to "pass off" as a clothing company and therefore was not acting in bad faith.
However, Azim-Khan thinks it might not be as easy as all that. He says: "If a US court makes a decision then that is a matter for the US courts. But what it seems like is the IOC has told its lawyers to go after the registrars, in Planet Scotland's case Network Solutions." Azim-Khan thinks that this is an attempt to enforce US legislation through "the back door".
He also suggests that the IOC might have been better to use the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) system, instead of the US act. ICAAN, the body that governs the whole internet domain name system, has recently introduced something called the Uniform Dispute Policy, of which WIPO is the most popular arbitrator. In another high-profile case the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) applied to WIPO over the domain name www.WorldWrestlingFederation.com. They managed to have the disputed domain transferred to them within a month. Azim-Khab thinks a similar attempt through the courts would take at least a year.
