IP: What's in an Address? Maybe a Lawsuit

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/10/biztech/articles/22web.html



October 22, 1999


What's in an Address? Maybe a Lawsuit

By PATRICK McGEEHAN and MATT RICHTEL

  xecutives of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Company have been boasting 
this week about their new on-line stock trading service and the head 
start they got on their competitors on Wall Street. But when it came 
to the Internet address they desired, somebody got a jump on them.



Depending on who is telling the story, that somebody is either a 
17-year-old schoolboy who created a Web site to share his passion for 
mountain-bike racing, or an opportunistic "cybersquatter" who 
registered dozens of Internet addresses in a scheme to exact ransoms 
from big-name corporations.

Typing in the domain name, or Web address, that Morgan Stanley 
coveted takes a Web surfer not to its electronic brokerage but 
instead to what appears to be a site dedicated to mountain biking. It 
carries a photo of a helmeted cyclist under the title Mud Sweat's 
Downhill World.

Ivan Wong, a senior at a private high school in Los Altos, Calif., 
said he created the site at www.msdwonline.com and named it after Mud 
Sweat & Gears, the shop that sold him his mountain bikes. "Me and my 
friends saw other sites on the Net," he said, sitting with his 
parents in the dining room of their spacious home in Hillsborough, 
north of Silicon Valley. "We wanted to start our own -- with a bunch 
of pictures and videos and stuff."

Morgan Stanley filed suit in United States District Court in 
Manhattan, contending that Mr. Wong's Web site infringes on the 
firm's trademarks. Morgan Stanley is asking a judge to stop Ivan from 
using the domain name.



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