Anti-abortion cybersquatter loses appeal

September 2004

A federal appeals court on Wednesday said an anti-abortion activist had violated trademark law by registering a slew of domain names, including drinkcoke.org, mycoca-cola.com, mymcdonalds.com, mypepsi.org, and my-washingtonpost.com.

Bill Purdy, who lives in South St. Paul, Minn., had purchased those and other domains, and used them to point visitors to prolife commentary and depictions of aborted and dismembered fetuses. Purdy claims that the companies he targeted promoted abortion.

Purdy had also registered WPNI.org, which is similar to the WPNI.com domain name that many Washington Post-Newsweek employees have as part of their e-mail addresses, and managed to snare some e-mail messages intended for reporters.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that Purdy's collection of Web sites were "confusingly similar" to legitimate ones and therefore likely violated a 1999 law called the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. The judges said a district court was correct to grant the companies a preliminary injunction that ordered Purdy to hand over his domains.