Chip Rosenthal Wins Unicom Domain Name Case

Seth Schoen writes "As seen last month, Chip Rosenthal (whom many people know for Reply-to Munging Considered Harmful, among other projects) was threatened with the loss of his domain name unicom.com. He's now won in court and will get to keep the domain, at least for the time being."

Comments

He didn't REALLY win--jurisdictional issues

[Elwood Blues]

Let me preface this by stating I'm currently a law student (actually in my civil procedure class right now).

The court did not render a judgment stating he had the right to his domain. Rather, they said that suing in California was not permissible due to a lack of jurisdiction over him.

There are several ways to establish jurisdiction over an out of state defendant:
-If Chris had "systematic and continuous" contacts with the State of California
-If his website was of an ambiguous (courts have a nebulous examination standard) level of interactivity and accessible from California (contacts with California established via the Internet)

Because they didn't find either of those, the court determined that he couldn't be tried in that court. This does not preclude the plaintiff from bringing a case in Texas against him.

Basically he just won this battle. It's possible the war is still going on.

Re:He didn't REALLY win--jurisdictional issues

[chip rosenthal]

I agree with your analysis. However it greatly rearranges the playing field, and that helps me tremendously. I won't have to fight a long-distance lawsuit. If they choose to re-file, they would have to retain ($$$$) Texas counsel. (I believe all of their work on the lawsuit to-date has been done with in-house counsel.)

I think the big value in the Unicom v. Rosenthal decision is that it provides the independent web publisher some peace of mind that some company cannot reach out, claim jurisdiction, and make them fight a long-distance lawsuit. That's very expensive and very difficult.

Clarifying the Win

[Jim Tyre]

We did win (I'm one of Chip's lawyers, so I can say "we"), but the thing isn't necessarily over yet.

Chip is in Austin, Texas, but the Plaintiff sued him in Los Angeles.

When we responded to the Complaint, we made several alternative motions, one being that a court in California lacked personal jurisdiction over Chip, not only because he's in Texas, but also because he does not have sufficient contacts with California to make it reasonable for him to be dragged into court here.

The Court granted our motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. That's a big victory, there's much to be said for the proposition that courts do not have unlimited reach, even when the Internet is involved (think Matt Pavlovich and the California DVDCCA case, for example), but it isn't a ruling on the merits.

If Plaintiff should choose to file a new action against Chip in Austin, we have plenty of ammunition for arguing the merits of his rightful claim to the unicom.com domain name, but readers should not assume that this win addressed that issue. The Court's ruling is here.

The thing..

[Heem]

The thing that bothers me the most about this is how much time and money it cost Chip just to defend himself. How many of us have those resources? If someone came after one of my domains, I'd fight as much as I could on my own, but in the end would probably be forced to give up. Thats what these corporate types want. they have the money and the resources to do this. There needs to be a law to protect US from this behavior.

Re:Have they tried

[Jim Tyre]

Going through the ICANN dispute resolution system? Have you?

No, they didn't go through ICANN. (Allegedly) aggrieved domain name owners can either use the ICANN UDRP or go to court, they're not required to use the ICANN procedures first. These folks chose to go to court first.

As for Chip, he would have no reason to go to ICANN. unicom.com is his domain name, he isn't contesting that the Plaintiff can keep its name, unicomsi.com.