Porsche v. Spencer

Citation: Porsche Cars N. America, Inc. v. Spencer, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 7060 (E.D. Cal. May 17, 2000).

Trial Court Proceedings
Plaintiffs filed suit against defendant for trademark infringement, dilution, and cybersquatting under the ACPA, and sought an order to preliminarily enjoin defendant from selling or transferring the domain name "porschesource.com" and to have defendant transfer that domain name to plaintiffs. Defendant owned numerous other "_______ source.com" domain names containing automobile manufacturers' names (e.g., "acurasource.com"), and offered them for sale.

The court held that plaintiffs established a strong likelihood of success on its ACPA claim by showing that the PORSCHE trademark was famous when defendant registered the domain name "porschesource.com" in December 1999, that defendant's "registration and trafficking" of the domain name would likely dilute the PORSCHE mark, and that defendant had a bad-faith intent to profit from the mark.

The court preliminarily enjoined defendant from "auctioning, offering for sale, transferring and/or using in any way" the domain name "porschesource.com," and ordered defendant to deactivate his website within six weeks. Defendant argued that plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction was moot because he voluntarily ceased using the domain name. The court rejected that argument as defendant failed to prove "that there is no possibility that he will again attempt to traffic or utilize the subject domain name in a way allegedly violative of the ACPA." The court did not, however, require defendant to assign the domain name to plaintiffs.

This page uses content from Finnegan’s Internet Trademark Case Summaries. This entry is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.