WIPO Declares WWF the Winner, But Sting Stung.

Pop singer Sting, a.k.a. Gordon Sumner, of the United Kingdom has lost his case to deny Michael Urvan of the United States the Internet address "sting.com".

In a 27 July decision, an arbitration panel of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that decides on abuses of Internet domain names said the singer had failed to prove bad faith on the part of Mr. Urvan, who had registered the domain name in July 1995. On his site, Mr. Urvan describes himself as a "competitive on-line gamer" and uses the name "=Sting=" in his gaming. The panel decided that "although it is accepted that the complainant (Gordon Sumner) is world famous under the name STING, it does not follow that he has rights in STING as a trademark or service mark", since the name in this case "is also a common word in the English language".

In the first such case of "cybersquatting" before WIPO, which was decided only six months earlier, the United States-based World Wrestling Federation Entertainment, Inc. (WWF) was declared a winner.

A California resident, in the legal equivalent of a full-body slam, was ordered on 14 January by a WIPO panel to hand over a domain name to the opponent ... er, "complainant".

The WWF had brought the suit against Michael Bosman, a United States citizen, who had registered the domain name "www.worldwrestlingfederation.com" and, three days later, offered to sell it back to the WWF at a substantial profit. The administrative panel in the case decided that the cybersquatter had legitimate interests in respect of the domain name.

As of 31 July, WIPO's Domain Name Dispute Resolution Service has received nearly 900 cases from complainants seeking to wrest back their Internet identity from alleged cybersquatters and its expert panels have rendered some 350 decisions, with 80 per cent of those in favour of complainants. In a series of rulings released on 1 August, panels also decided in favour of Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AT&T Corp.