US Federal Appeals Court Rules On Cybersquatting Law

by Glen Shapiro, LawAndTax-News.com, New York

13 February 2003

The Legal Intelligencer news service reported on Wednesday that a previous ruling limiting the jurisdiction of anti-cybersquatting laws in the United States has been overturned, and that although the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act may not be applied retroactively, re-registration of a disputed internet domain name can bring the site back within the law's reach.

According to The Legal Intelligencer:

'In Schmidheiny v. Weber, the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals revived a billionaire's lawsuit against an alleged cybersquatter who offered to sell him the internet domain with the billionaire's name followed by dot-com. A lower court dismissed Stephan Schmidheiny's suit after finding that Steven Weber had originally registered schmidheiny.com more than nine months before the law took effect in November 1999.'

However, 3rd Circuit Judges have now decided that the re-registration of the domain name in the summer of 2000 represents 'an action within the purview of the Anti-Cybersquatting Act.'

'We do not consider the 'creation date' of a domain name to control whether a registration is subject to the Anti-Cybersquatting Act, and we believe that the plain meaning of the word 'registration' is not limited to 'creation registration', Judge Richard L. Nygaard explained, continuing:

'To conclude otherwise would permit the domain names of living persons to be sold and purchased without the living persons' consent, ad infinitum, so long as the name was first registered before the effective date of the Act.'

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