Cybersquatter takes aim at biggest law firms

October 4th, 2002
By Becky Knapp (bizjournal.com)

So just under 100 law firms nationwide ended up before the National Arbitration Forum in Minnesota, a nonprofit organization approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), to get its name back.

Now, the arbitrators have found for Foley & Lardner, saying that Wick's domain name was "identical or confusingly similar" to the trademark name used by Foley & Lardner since at least 1969.

Wick isn't moved nor, he says, is he finished pestering law firms.

"I'm having fun, and I'm not going away," he says, insisting he is only exercising his right to free speech. "It's no different than passing out fliers at a physical address," he says of his Web sites. "It's no different than if you drive down the highway to go to Winn-Dixie and find me walking across the entrance holding a sign that says something."

This may be cold comfort to Winn-Dixie Stores, whose name Wick also holds Internet domain name registration rights to as well as Coors Brewing Co., Honeywell International, Capital One Financial Corp., SunTrust Banks and Costco. "I started taking names of large businesses because they need to be challenged," Wick says, who views his work as "getting in the face of big business."

It's nothing new to Wick, who back in the '80s, while a student at the University of Colorado, says he would "dress up rather peculiar, with a big yellow W on my head, and stand in front of businesses, passing out fliers," he says. "But now instead of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant outside Boulder, where they made all the warheads, I get right in the face of big business" via the Internet.

It's not a part-time hobby. Wick has more than 6,000 generic domain names, such as discountchairs.com and discountglass.com. And it's not cheap: Maintenance on his sites runs between $60,000 and $70,000 a year. Wick foots the bill with personal savings accumulated when he worked as a computer programmer.

That has left him free to pursue what he considers a critical chapter in free speech. "At this point, I'm the last guy left on the planet," he says of his free speech advocacy. "If I didn't have strong convictions about where the Internet is going, I wouldn't be doing this. It's a very important time in our history where businesses are being represented electronically as well as physically."

The free speech argument, though, may not wash in a court of law.

Steven Greenberg, the Akerman Senterfitt attorney who went up against the Coloradoan to reclaim that firm's domain name, says his firm made case law on when a claim of free speech is appropriate.

"In the past, people said parody or free speech was a legitimate use at a domain," he says, "but we said that would be true if the parody or political free speech was included as part of the domain name such as 'Wal-mart sucks' in which the domain itself contains the parody."

Wick, who counts 15 lawyers among his 65 cousins, doesn't care what the law firms think. He is, he says, going to continue to enjoy "the pure sport of messing with lawyers."

"Lawyers," he adds with some satisfaction, "are very paranoid people."