For those of you that have been watching the Sarasota Association of Realtors case versus Marc Rasmussen, there has been a nasty new development. After losing the case in court, the SARS still fuming about being told no, decided to try a different tact. They went to ICANN to have the domain take by force from the owner and transferred to them. Their arguement was trademark infringement, but to date, no evidence of prior trademark ownership has been produced (anyone heard of Major League Soccer (MLS)?).
Apparently, that was not an issue for ICANN who has grabbed up the url and has given it to the Sarasota Association of Realtors. Now, we have all run across sites that have REALTOR and MLS in the URL, most of which belong to non-Realtors. Yet, strangely enough these sites continue to be online with nary a word of opposition from any REALTOR association? So why was Marc singled out? Simple, Marc had spent thousands of dollars and man hours promoting his URL so that it showed up on major search engines in the top spot for certain terms like…..Sarasota MLS. Now I’m wondering who in the association there in Sarasota is going to get the leads being brought in, now that they have control of the URL?
Their arguement: consumers could be confused by Marc’s url, since it was not THE SARASOTA MLS.
I’m not sure what that says about what they think of the average Internet home searcher. Marc’s site had been up since 2003 and had a disclaimer at the bottom clearly stating that his site was not THE SARASOTA MLS and he was a REALTOR. The URL had been redirected to Marc’s new URL, ensuring that no one would be ‘confused’, but apparently that wasn’t good enough for SARs. Marc is still fighting the Sarasota Association of Realtors in court.
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Gulf shoreslife 10.22.08 at 2:24 pm
Wow, can you believe that? Thanks for the update!
Matt 10.26.08 at 12:29 pm
This entire episode is becoming more and more unreal. When will NAR step up and reverse SAR’s antics?
Toby Barnett 10.27.08 at 9:53 am
Some part of me thinks we are going to see more of this as the web becomes even more competitive.
Sara Sota 10.27.08 at 1:19 pm
I’m donating my ad revenue to this cause.
Charles 11.01.08 at 2:50 pm
Toby, I think you may be right. This case carries some far reaching implications and sets a dangerous precendent. Marc won his intial case and instead of honoring that decision, ICANN has decided to supercede its authority.