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Defamation by Domain Name Misdirection
In the case of Inform Cycle Ltd. v. Draper, the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench considered the tort of registering a misleading domain name and directing a company’s business to a competitor and to a pornographic website.
Draper, a former employee of Inform Cycle, registered the domain name InformCycle.com and directed its traffic to a competitor for a period of about three weeks. Following this, Draper then directed the traffic of InformCycle.com to a pornographic website while away on vacation until Inform Cycle was able to interrupt the forward two weeks later. Inform Cycle commenced an action against Draper, claiming damages for passing off, defamation and the intentional tort of “knowingly and deliberately undertaking the registration and forwarding of the misleading domain name”. With regard to “passing off”, although there was no evidence that Inform Cycle actually lost sales, there was a presumption of damages and the judge awarded Inform Cycle $5,000 in damages. With respect to “defamation”, Inform Cycle was awarded an additional $5,000 in damages as a result of InformCycle.com traffic being directed to a pornographic website. With regard to the tort of knowingly and deliberately undertaking the registration and forwarding of the misleading domain name, the judge awarded no damages, holding that he did not understand or recognize the tort. He held that there was nothing objectionable in simply registering a domain name, and that any misuse of the registered name would be subsumed into the passing off and defamation torts. He did, however, order an additional $5,000 in punitive damages.
For a copy of the decision, visit: