Those Dominant Yankees Fight for a Domain Name Thursday, January 6, 2000
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
The fight over an Internet address for the New York Yankees, depending on whom you talk to, is either the story of a giant sports franchise seeking to crush a hapless fan or one of an unprincipled ''cybersquatter'' hoping to cash in on the team's popularity.
Lawyers for the team and for Brian McKiernan, a 41-year-old Queens man involved in the dispute, agree on a few basic facts. Sometime in June 1997, while fishing around with his three children on the Internet, Mr. McKiernan discovered that the name newyorkyankees.com had not been registered. So he paid a small fee and got the rights to the name.
But from here the accounts begin to diverge. Mr. McKiernan's lawyer says the Yankees ultimately offered his client $450 plus tickets to two games in exchange for relinquishing the Internet domain name. The team contends in court papers that Mr. McKiernan demanded $25,000.
The acrimony reached the point where on Dec. 24 lawyers for the Yankees filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Brooklyn seeking to wrest the domain name from Mr. McKiernan.
''Mr. McKiernan insists on selling back to the Yankees that which is rightfully theirs, which is their name,'' said Ethan G. Orlinsky, the lawyer speaking for the Yankees and the other plaintiff in the suit, Major League Baseball Properties, which owns the rights to market the names of the 30 Major League Baseball teams.
''We did not feel it was appropriate to buy it back for, among other reasons, it is outrageous behavior,'' Mr. Orlinsky said. The Yankees already own most combinations of their name, and operate their official site at yankees.com.
But Mr. McKiernan's lawyer, John S. Selinger, paints the lawsuit as a David versus Goliath fight, with his client hoping one day to use the now inactive address to establish a fan site and instead finding himself facing a battery of high-priced lawyers.
Mr. Selinger denies that Mr. McKiernan asked for $25,000, but he admits that Mr. McKiernan did use the address initially to advertise various businesses he runs, including a paging service for nurses.
Mr. Selinger said Mr. McKiernan planned to build the fan site himself and was just using the advertisements for his business as test runs, which he stopped about 18 months ago.
There is no question that the buying and selling of domain names has become a lucrative business. In what is thought to be the highest price ever paid for an Internet address, a Los Angeles company paid $7.5 million last fall for the domain name business.com.
But a law passed by Congress in November was intended to stamp out cybersquatting, in which individuals register Internet addresses -- usually for as little as $70 for two years -- in hopes of reselling them.
The newly enacted law strengthened the rights of the trademark holders to claim the addresses and to seek up to $100,000 in damages against the squatters. In the last month, it has fueled suits like the Yankees case around the country.