Pamela Anderson beats an old foe to get domain name.
Pamela Anderson has won a case for the domain name PamAnderson.com in an arbitration case at World Intellectual Property Forum.
The case was brought against Alberta Hot Rods, a group that had a run in with Anderson back in 2002. In the 2002 WIPO case Anderson won the domain names PamelaAnderson.com, PamelaAnderson.net, and PamelaLee.com.
What’s somewhat strange is how Anderson didn’t go after the PamAnderson.com domain name earlier, and that was a troubling question to one panelist who questioned the merits of the case. Panelist Neil Brown also called it “very dubious” that PamAnderson.com is confusingly similar to PamelaAnderson.com
Sure, that could be cleared up by looking at the content of the web site at the domain, but the idea that a domain is confusingly similar to a mark must rest on its own — not based on the content a person sees when they actually visit the site. In fact, this is a common argument made against gripe sites, where a complainant says that people won’t understand that a domain in unaffiliated with the complainant until they actually visit the site.
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