The United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois granted summary judgment in favor of a plaintiff who claimed that the defendant’s registration and use of fifteen domain names incorporating variations of plaintiff’s trademark KERACARE caused dilution of the mark.
Plaintiff Avlon owns the incontestable trademark registration for the mark KeraCare for hair care products. Defendant Robinson is in the hair care products industry as well, and does business under the name Sheldeez Hair Prouducts and Salon. Robinson registered at least fifteen domain names incorporating variations of Avlon’s mark, including www.keracare.com. From these sites, Robinson offered for sale hair care products made by both Avlon and Avlon’s competitors.
Avlon sued Robinson claiming, among other things, that Robinson’s incorporation of Avlon’s mark in his domain names diluted Avlon’s mark, in violation of Section 43(c) of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1125(c). (Dilution is defined in Section 45 of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1127 as “the lessening of the capacity of a famous mark to identify and distinguish goods or services, regardless of the presence or absence of (1) competition between the owner of the famous mark and other parties, or (2) likelihood of confusion, mistake, or deception.) Avlon moved for summary judgment on the dilution claim, and the court granted Avlon’s motion.
Robinson first argued that Avlon had failed to show the KeraCare mark is famous. The court disagreed, and found that the mark is famous. The court noted that Robinson’s actions in part betrayed the mark’s fame – if the mark was unfamiliar to the vast majority of shoppers, Robinson would not have registered at least fifteen variants of the word as domain names. The court also gave weight to the fact that Avlon’s mark was incontestable under Section 15 of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. §1065. Finally, the court also gave weight to the fact that Avlon sells millions of dollars of KeraCare products annually, and that Robinson himself testified that the KeraCare line is one of four product lines that are “well known and respected in a marketplace ‘flooded’ with product lines.”
Robinson next argued that Avlon had failed to establish actual dilution of its mark as required by the Supreme Court’s decision in Moseley v. V Secret Catalogue, Inc. et al. 537 U.S. 418 (2003). The court was not persuaded by this argument. It looked to the portion of Moseley which states that “actual dilution can reliably be proved through circumstantial evidence–the obvious case is one where the junior and senior marks are identical.” Because Robinson’s domain names used Avlon’s exact marks, the court found that Avlon had shown actual dilution. The court noted that actual dilution was also supported by the fact that Robinson’s control over all possible variations of Avlon’s marks permitted him to decide what messages and goods are associated with such marks.
Avlon Indus. v. Robinson, 2005 WL 331561 (N.D.Ill. Feb. 8, 2005).