De Beers tries to force spoof Web site offline over fake ad

04.12.2008

In addition, liability for violations of U.S. trademark law doesn't extend to domain name registrars, according to Zimmerman. "Part of the problem here is that it's not entirely clear what the basis of De Beers' threat is," he said. "But in any case, under U.S. law, Joker.com, doing nothing here but serving as the domain name registrar, wouldn't be on the hook."

Nonetheless, the strategy of targeting hosting firms or domain name registrars isn't uncommon, Zimmerman said. He noted that the content on the spoof site is protected under the First Amendment, making it unlikely that De Beers could make much headway by challenging the legality of the content itself.

The , a Swiss bank, employed a similar tactic earlier this year in an attempt to shut down whistleblower Web site Wikileaks.org. In February, Julius Baer sued Wikileaks and domain name registrar Dynadot LLC over the posting of some bank documents on the whistleblower site. Dynadot quickly agreed to disable and lock the wikileaks.org domain name, a decision that received legal backing when a federal judge in California issued an injunction ordering the registrar to permanently disable the domain name in the U.S. and clear and remove all of its DNS hosting records.

However, the judge later after it was by , including the EFF.

There have been other cases as well, Zimmerman said in a on the EFF site. One example is a case in September, in which a judge in Kentucky ordered several domain name registrars to give the state ownership of the domain names of some Web sites that were believed to be involved in online gambling, which is illegal in Kentucky.