Plaintiff likely to succeed on merits of claim under Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA).
Defendant worked as a dealer, spokesperson and consultant to plaintiff. About the time she ended her relationship with plaintiff, defendant and another woman formed a competing business and registered several domain names comprised of plaintiff’s trademark or otherwise mimicking the domain name of plaintiff’s legitimate site. They used those domain names to redirect web users to the new company’s website.
Plaintiff sued under the ACPA and sought a temporary restraining order against the use of the domain names. In entering the TRO, the court found plaintiff was likely to succeed on the merits of its ACPA claim.
The court easily found the domain names were confusingly similar to plaintiff’s registered trademarks.
On the issue of bad faith use or registration, the court looked to the prior relationship between the parties, the electronic mail correspondence between them, and the undisputed fact that the parties were competitors. The court concluded that common sense suggested that the direction of traffic with the use of the disputed domain names to defendants’ website was for the purpose of commercial gain. Therefore, the court concluded that plaintiff had established a likelihood of success on the merits as to the cybersquatting claim.
Ball Dynamics Int’l LLC v. Saunders, 2016 WL 7034974 (D. Colo. December 1, 2016)