A UN agency has ruled that ownership of the domain name thesimpsonsmovie.com must be handed to Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, which owns the rights to the film and the popular TV series of the same name.
Twentieth Century Fox filed a complaint to the World Intellectual Property Organization over the use of the film's name in the Internet address of a site registered by Keith Malley of Brooklyn, New York.
Malley was using the address to divert Internet users to a Web site that included sexually explicit depictions of several characters from The Simpsons and, later, to his Keith and the Girl Web site. He was demanding a US$50,000 fee from Twentieth Century Fox for the domain name's return, according to the July 22 ruling of the WIPO arbitration panel.
The court found that Malley "has no rights or legitimate interests with respect to the domain name" and ordered its immediate return.
RSS