Domain Registration Related News
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.
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