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Digital Legal
Lady Gaga fails to seize dot org domain
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 26 September 2011
Lady Gaga has failed to take ownership of the LadyGaga.org domain. Team Gaga applied to America’s National Arbitration Forum, which hears domain disputes on behalf of the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names & Numbers, claiming that the owner of the dot org domain that uses the pop star’s name was acting in bad faith and violating the singer’s trademark.
However, in the main domains are distributed on a first come first served basis, and ownership of a name via a registered company or trademark is not usually sufficient to demand related domain ownership over an earlier registrant. In order to take control of an already registered domain you usually need to show particularly ‘bad faith’ on the part of the original registrant, which might include passing off or extortion, the latter basically enabled Madonna to take control of her dot com domain.
But none of that could be proven by Team Gaga in this case, given that LadyGaga.org is a fan site that makes no claim to be official, which has no commercial objectives, and which exists solely to tell the world how great Lady Gaga is, albeit when she’s not going to arbitration to try and steal domain names off fans.
All of which means last week the National Arbitration Forum rejected Gaga’s application to seize control of her dot org domain.
