Falwell Beats A Cybersquatter

Typing www.jerryfalwell.com into your locator bar won't take you to the anti-Rev. Jerry Falwell Website it formerly did, now that Falwell has won the rights to that and a second namesake domain, jerryfallwell.com, back from a cybersquatter.

And it might not have taken almost three years to accomplish, if Falwell could have remembered he had formally trademarked his name several years ago.

The minister and former Moral Majority chairman learned earlier this month that attorneys for an Illinois man running the anti-Falwell site on both domains agreed to turn them over to Falwell instead of squaring off with Falwell in court, according to the Lynchburg News and Advance

Falwell had planned a lawsuit in federal court in Chicago, after spending two years trying to get the sites from Gary Cohn. Cohn had been told to stop using Falwell's name in October 2001 by John Midlen, an intellectual property attorney working with Falwell. When that didn't work, Falwell filed a complaint four months later with the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, which ruled against the minister three months afterward.

Falwell first tried taking Cohn to court in Lynchburg in June 2002, claiming illegal use of Falwell's trademark, libelous competition, and cybersquatting, the News and Advance said. The suit was thrown out earlier this year on grounds that the court had no jurisdiction over a site run from Illinois and not aimed specifically at a Virginia viewership.

But after that dismissal, the News and Advance said, Falwell and his attorneys discovered Falwell had trademarked his name, with his talk show, Listen, America a number of years earlier. "We'd forgotten we'd done it," Falwell was quoted as saying. Falwell's son, Jerry, Jr., told the newspaper they weren't certain whether that trademarking was the decisive factor in Cohn finally surrendering the domains.

 "It's unfortunate," his father said, "that we had to spend two years claiming what already belongs to us," he said.

Falwell still has another trademark tussle on his hands, however. American Liberty University in Montgomery, Alabama is negotiating with Falwell's Liberty University over the domain name www.libertyuniversity.edu. His son told the News and Advance that Falwell is prepared to take them to court if the negotiations fail to turn over the domain to the Falwell institution.