In my previous article, I took a retrospective glance at my old law degree dissertation from the University of Southampton, revisiting pre-UDRP domain name disputes and cases like prince.com and epix.com. I enjoyed writing it (though you may have felt otherwise reading it), but I’m back with a few more tales from the early, often lawless, days of domain name conflicts.
One of the standouts from that era was harrods.com. An enterprising individual, Michael Lawrie, spotted the opportunity and registered the domain through Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) – then the gatekeepers of the .com universe. Unsurprisingly, this drew the attention of Harrods, the eponymous London department store, which already ran a website from harrods.co.uk.
With no UDRP, Harrods had only one option: litigation. The resulting case, Harrods v. Lawrie ([1997] CLSR 303), is one of the earliest domain name disputes to reach the courts. Harrods alleged trade mark infringement, passing off, conspiracy, and reputational damage. Unfortunately for keen law students, Lawrie didn’t appear at the hearing. An injunction was granted, and the domain handed over. A useful reminder of just how slow, costly, and uncertain the process was in the absence of a dispute resolution mechanism.
At the time, my dissertation had to lean heavily on conventional trade mark cases. One example was Glaxo Plc. v. GlaxoWellcome Ltd. ([1996] FSR 360), where someone registered the company name ahead of the merger of Glaxo and Wellcome.
The explanation offered? It was “an interesting combination of words.” Mr Justice Lightman was not convinced, observing that there are “limitations to judicial credulity.” The fact pattern might sound familiar to anyone who deals with speculative domain registrations today.
Across the Atlantic, the US courts were grappling with the same issues. I covered Panavision International L.P. v. Toeppen (945 F. Supp. 1296 (C.D. Cal. 1996)), in which Panavision discovered that Dennis Toeppen had registered panavision.com.
The court concluded that “registration of a trade[mark] as a domain name, without more, is not a commercial use of the trade mark.” However, Toeppen’s broader pattern of registering domains like aircanada.com, camdenyards.com, lufthansa.com, and yankeestadium.com helped the court characterise his activity as commercial – essentially a business model of selling domains to trade mark owners. He even has a Wikipedia page to mark his place in domain name history.
The picture these cases paint is clear: a system with no structure, few rules, and little recourse beyond the courts. Rights holders faced high costs and slow processes, while domain speculation thrived.
Thankfully, things have changed. Today we benefit from robust dispute mechanisms – the UDRP, Nominet’s DRS, and a variety of ccTLD systems – which offer quicker, cheaper, and more consistent outcomes.
At Com Laude, we’re proud to represent some of the world’s leading businesses in navigating domain name challenges, and we continue to help shape the evolution of these systems.