20 February 2023
TOPEKA, Kan. (KSNT) – Casey Mclenon is the owner of Little Russia Chili Parlor in Little Russia. With any new business, advertising is important. So, you can imagine the disbelief he had when he found out he wouldn’t be able to use the unique name of his restaurant when registering his domain.
What might be first looked at as a coincidence quickly turned into a dispute. Not only does the person who purchased littlerussiachiliparlor.com not own a restaurant with the name,
the person who purchased littlerussiachiliparlor.com is a neighbor living in Topeka.
It’s a problem that has the new owner of this restaurant hot.
“They key words of the business name Little Russia Chili Parlor are not in the domain we are currently utilizing at 508 Pickles because they’ve already been taken,” Mclenon said. “So, it changes the efficiency of the website marketing. The biggest challenge of any business is letting people know you exist.”
When it comes to registering a web address, it’s first come, first serve. KSNT-TV called the man who purchased it several times. He works for the state’s health department, but he never returned the calls requesting an interview. So is there any hope for the restaurant owner? Perhaps an attorney can help provide that answer.
“Generally speaking, if someone registers a trademark in a domain name they don’t have authority to use and they use that domain name in bad faith, and that’s critical, that has to be proven in a case where the case rises or falls, then the complainant who is the brand owner can have the domain name transferred to them or canceled,” Hovey Williams LLP partner, Cheryl Burbach said.
According to Burbach, some examples of bad faith include not doing anything with a trademark that truly belongs to somebody else and holding the domain rights for more money than it’s actually worth.
“If I registered a domain name that cost me $10, I have no business that is affiliated with that name, and I say, oh sure, I’ll sell it to you for half a million dollars, that’s evidence of bad faith unless you can prove the domain is worth half a million dollars,” Burbach said.
“We talked about pricing back and forth, and I didn’t feel like I wanted to be held hostage to something like this,” Mclenon said. “I feel like I shouldn’t be having to pay 10, or 20, or 30 or 100 times what the domain registry fee would be.”
Mclenon says what is going on feels predatory and unethical. All he wants is to be able to register the domain under the name of his restaurant so he can continue to advertise properly.