A few years back, Dan Parisi ticked off the White House when he registered the domain "whitehouse.com" and turned it into a lucrative porn site.
Then he ticked off some of the world's biggest corporations by registering what he calls the "Sucks 500," a list of 500 domains like Microsoftsucks.com and Intelsucks.com, based on the Fortune 500. Surfers who type in a "Sucks 500" URL end up at Parisi's sucks.com site -- "a place where all people can get together and vent their grievances about Corporate America."
Still, no matter how much he's irritated his powerful government and industry foes -- and no matter how persistent their legal threats -- he's managed to keep the domains.
But when he paid a domain speculator $20,000 for the domain Madonna.com and turned it into a porn site, he ticked off both his Catholic mother and pop superstar Madonna, and now his domain winning streak is in jeopardy.
Madonna, whose full name is Madonna Ciccone, filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization's domain dispute arbitrators. She says Parisi is willfully using her trademarked name for ill-gotten gain, and legal experts say it's likely that WIPO arbitrators will agree with her and order Network Solutions to transfer the domain.
"If Madonna's people have done their case right, they should prevail," said Sally Abel, a trademark lawyer at Fenwick & West in Palo Alto, California, and a sometime arbitrator of domain disputes for WIPO.
Madonna's lawyer declined comment.
Parisi, however, thinks Madonna's legal case is ludicrous, and he's not backing down.
"This case is about whether big business has the right to claim exclusive ownership of common words in the English language and to take them out of the public domain," he wrote in a note posted at the madonna.com site. "(Madonna) was named after the Virgin Mary, as was her mother and hundreds of thousands of other people throughout the world over the past 2,000 years. We do not believe that because Ms. Ciccone named her act after the Virgin Mary that gives her the right to stop any other party from using the word 'madonna' as a title of their website."
Madonna does, nonetheless, have a trademark for the use of the name "Madonna" as a musician and performer. But because it's a common name, she'll have to prove to WIPO that Parisi registered madonna.com in bad faith -- that he had no legitimate business interest in the domain and hoped only to profit from its association with Madonna the pop star.
In a similar case in late July, British pop singer Sting failed to convince WIPO that the sting.com domain owner, a computer gamer who used "sting" as his gaming alias for eight years, had registered the domain in bad faith. The gamer got to keep his domain.
For his part, Parisi claims he had a perfectly legitimate business interest when he registered Madonna.com: he wanted to create a popular, if perhaps scandalous, porn site based on an iconic religious name. That might have been in bad religious faith, but it wasn't in bad legal faith, he said. He bristles at the accusation that he was cybersquatting, saying he never tried to sell the domain to Madonna, and, in fact, rebuffed her attempts to buy it.
"We're not in the business of selling domains," he said.
Still, if Madonna can convince the WIPO arbitrators that Parisi hoped Madonna.com would be popular and profitable because it would lure people looking for her legitimate website, she will have demonstrated bad faith, said Sally Abel.
Parisi's ownership of the porn site whitehouse.com, which gets lots of traffic from confused surfers, won't help his case.
Still, said Abel, if Madonna's going to sway the arbitrator, she may need to find more potent proof of Parisi's bad intent. "She'll need to provide some written communication or other evidence," Abel said.
And there's yet another complication for Madonna's legal team: Parisi stopped trying to make money with Madonna.com more than a year ago.
In fact, he says, after taking heat from his Catholic mother about posting porn at Madonna.com, he decided to donate the domain to Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital, a Catholic hospital in Nebraska that owns the madonna.org domain.
"My mother was on me to give it to the church," said Parisi. "She was not happy about the porn site."
The deal to transfer the domain had already been negotiated when Madonna filed her complaint and stopped the exchange, Parisi said.
The hospital corroborated Parisi's account and said it would very much like to have the domain -- but not if it comes with a rabid bunch of lawyers for Madonna.
"We don't want to get into a lawsuit," said Charles Pallesen, an attorney representing the hospital. "If Mr. Parisi gets the matter straightened out with Madonna, then we'll be happy to take the domain."
If the hospital, which obviously does have a legitimate interest in the Madonna name, does manage to obtain the madonna.com domain, Madonna the pop star will have an extremely hard time getting her hands on it.
"Obviously, if the hospital gets it, Madonna will have to present a different case to WIPO," Abel said.
Parisi, however, isn't entirely optimistic that he'll be able to keep the domain and make the transfer. "WIPO has ruled for (the complainant) about 85 percent of the time. Even if they're wrong about the trademark issues, they can still take the domain from you."
