NEW YORK - The Authors Guild, Inc., on behalf of nine authors, R.L. Stine, John Berendt, Charles Frazier, Thomas L. Friedman, Joanna Lindsey, Louis Sachar, Elizabeth Strout, Susan Elizabeth Phillips and Billie Letts, has won its proceeding against Old Barn Studios, Ltd., to transfer to the authors the ".com" domain names incorporating the authors' names.

“My name is all I've got as an author,” said Louis Sachar, award-winning author of many young adult novels, including last year’s Newbery Award-winning Holes, “If some unrelated person is going to co-opt my name in cyberspace, and fails to use it to identify a web site related to my books or myself, that’s going to endanger my career, as well as my reputation. This is a great decision for authors and others whose reputation is their most valued possession.”

“I am very happy to get my domain name back,” said Thomas L. Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, “and I look forward to registering it in my own behalf.”

The complaint, prepared by intellectual property attorney Adam Cohen of the New York City law firm Kane Kessler, P.C., alleged that each of the authors has common law trademark rights in his or her name by virtue of his or her international reputation, and that Old Barn Studios did not have proprietary rights to those names. The proceeding was brought in accordance with the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy adopted by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

The administrative panel of three arbitrators agreed with the Guild's contentions, and concluded that the Guild had proven that the contested domain names were confusingly similar to the trademarks consisting of the authors’ names, that the respondent had no rights or legitimate interests in the contested domain names, and that the respondent had registered and used the contested domain names in bad faith.

The panel ordered all nine contested domain names be transferred to the Authors Guild.

A key precedent set was the panel's finding that bad faith, a necessary element of any ICANN case, was proved even though Old Barn was “not actually using any of the contested domain names to point to a web site.”

It found that the Guild had “argued convincingly that, given the reputation of the authors in question, and their works being widely sold in the USA and the UK, it is hard to understand how the respondent could have any rights or legitimate interests in any of the contested domain names.”

Furthermore, Old Barn’s registration of a large number of authors’ names as domains was found to be indicative of a bad-faith intent to profit from names in which the respondent had no rights.

Attorney Adam Cohen said: “This decision confirms our belief that the ICANN procedure works. We are pleased that the panel found that authors have common law trademark rights in their names and that persons with no legitimate rights to those names who register domain names incorporating the authors’ names and then warehouse those domain names or seek to sell them back to the author must be required, under the ICANN rules, to return those domain names to their rightful owners.”