Law School Canons: Pierson v. Post v. Cybersquatting

Editor’s Note: Avery Welker is a 1L at Mizzou and likely a future patent attorney. He is starting a new series linking law school canonical cases with intellectual property counterparts. You can email ideas for future posts to avery@patentlyo.com. – Dennis Crouch

By Avery Welker

Modeling v. modelling, labeled v. labelled, traveler v. traveller. We borrow a lot from British English in United States English but that doesn’t usually include the extra consonant in words. That’s not quite how Travelers Indemnity Company (Travelers / plaintiff; see logo below) felt when they alleged, among other things, trademark infringement and cybersquatting against Travellers.com (Travellers.com / defendant). Travelers Indem. Co. v. Travellers.com, Civ. No. 10–cv–448 (LO/JFA) 2011 WL 5975082 *1 (E.D. Va., Nov. 28, 2011).

Travelers is a well-established company, Number 106 on the Fortune 500 list, has been around since 1853, and has received lots of unsolicited media coverage. Id. at *3-4. Additionally, Travelers has used the Travelers name and mark since 1865 and has registered their mark with the USPTO under Reg. No. 1,611,053. Id. Below is the “promotional merchandise catalog” cover and clip of the “Un-Retirement Program,” a program for retirees to do temporary work with Travelers, which Travelers used in their USPTO specimen to prove its use in commerce.

Travellers.com, on the other hand, is a site that provides links to other similar traveler insurance sites, and gets revenue on a pay-per-click basis for every time someone uses a link to another traveling insurance provider. Id. at *4. Travelers claimed that Travellers.com activities were cybersquatting, their website was unlawful, and their website infringed on Travelers’s mark. Id.

For Travelers to prove entitlement to summary judgment on Cybersquatting, they needed to prove that the owner of Travellers.com planned to profit in bad faith from the website, and that Travellers.com was used in an inappropriate manner. Id. at *7. One factor in analyzing whether the owner of Travellers.com had any bad faith intent to profit from the website was to determine whether Travellers.com had any intellectual property rights in the name. Id. The owner of Travellers.com asserted that, under Pierson v. Post, he had a first-in-time possessory claim to the Travellers.com domain. Id.

Just like many other 1L Property students, my Property class this semester began with everyone’s favorite fox hunter and the “saucy intruder” that ended up with the kill. Pierson v. Post, 3 Cai. R. 175, 181 (Supreme Ct. NY 1805). Pierson takes the seemingly simple concept of possessory rights but asks the necessary question – what is possession of a fox? Id. at 177. After going through many historical authors, the court in Pierson determined that possession of the fox was established by killing or mortally wounding it. Id. at 177.

Unsurprisingly, the court in Travelers determined that the rule of capture did not excuse bad faith in Travellers.com’s defense of Cybersquatting. Travelers Indem. Co., 2011 WL 5975082 at *7. Unfortunately for Travellers.com, the court found bad faith intent to profit, and that the website was subject to forfeit. Id. at *8. Travellers.com now directs to Travelers Indemnity Company. Id.

Travellers.com’s use of the rule of capture was a creative yet wholly ineffective defense to a finding of bad faith intent to profit off of the Travelers mark. So far, in Property I, I have been learning that many people may be asserting a right to property, but the big question is finding out who has the superior right in a controversy. Introducing the concept of proper “signaling” of property ownership is effectively presented by Pierson v. Post.