Golden Nugget sues website operator over alleged cybersquatting
Facebook
Fark
Digg
Reddit
StumbleMonday
23 May 2011
9:40 a.m.
The Golden Nugget casinos in Southern Nevada are suing another website operator, charging cybersquatting and trademark infringement.
GNLV Corp., owner of the hotel-casinos in Las Vegas and Laughlin, filed suit Friday in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas against Kanter Associates SA.
The suit says Kanter does business in Panama and runs a website called thegoldennuggett.com, which appears to be intentionally misspelled with an extra "t."
This website links to travel and reservation services involving the Golden Nuggets, other gaming properties and airlines.
"Defendant has registered, trafficked in and/or used a domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to and/or dilutive of plaintiff’s trademarks," the lawsuit alleges.
Kanter officials couldn’t immediately be located for comment.
This suit follows an April 27 lawsuit in the same court against the operator of the www.golddennugget.com site, also allegedly deliberately misspelled with an extra "d."
The Nevada Golden Nuggets are represented in the lawsuits by attorneys with the Las Vegas office of the law firm Greenberg Traurig LLP.
Share
Discussion 3 comments
Comments are moderated by VegasInc editors. Our goal is not to limit the discussion, but rather to elevate it. Comments should be relevant and contain no abusive language. Comments that are off-topic, vulgar, profane or include personal attacks will be removed. Full comments policy.
Additionally, we now display comments from trusted commenters by default. Those wishing to become a trusted commenter need to verify their identity or sign in with Facebook Connect to tie their Facebook account to their VEGAS INC account. For more on this change, read our story about how it works and why we did it.
Only trusted comments are displayed on this page. Untrusted comments have expired from this story.
Post a comment
Commenting requires registration.
If you have a LasVegasSun.com account, you are already registered.
No need to sue. ICANN which is the international body that regulates domain names and numbers has procedures in place to settle these kinds of disputes through arbitration. I own a site called justmanuals.com and one of my Russian competitors registered a domain name of justmanual.com. I sent him a cease and desist letter that I wrote myself and he folded. Transferred the domain name right away.
Paul,
ICANN farms the disputes out to a third party. They charge upfront fee's and take 8 to 12 months to resolve the matter. If the offending party is out of the country it can take even longer.
You got luck with your guy folding his cards and giving you the domain right off. He could have held you off for over a year if he wanted to.
Many times an email will stop some people but other times it does take a court to get it done right. Costly either way and time consuming.
I had spoken to a lawyer about it previously. He wanted to charge me $3500 to file the claim and go to arbitration. He offered to send a letter for $200. I did it myself. I feel I scored a major coup. :)