The War of the World s star won the battle on three critical grounds that the WIPO favored at the end. First was the domain name's being perfectly identical or confusingly similar to his name. Second was that the accused had neither legal rights nor legitimate permission to own the name. And lastly, that his name used for a website was used in bad faith.
Burgar, on the other hand, banked his defense on his right to freedom of speech. WIPO undoubtedly dismissed his defense for the reason that the freedom of speech does not entail a person the right to take possession of a trademark, much more use it for unfair commercial trading.
Burgar's second level of defense did not also work. His defense team argued that the ten year old existence of the site had not been in any conflict or resistance from the side of Tom Cruise. They furthered that the length of time that the battle had taken has an implication of lack of interest from Cruise's camp. Burgars lawyers cited a previous Uniform Domain Resolution Policy UDRP decision that a two year period is already enough for losing rights to a domain name property. But the WIPO still did not buy this argument, saying that it was inaccurate and had no meaningful precedence over the matter.
Cruise s camp was at an advantage upon capitalizing on past cases filed and won against Burgar by other big stars and celebrities like Celine Dion, Kevin Spacey, Jeffrey Archer, Michael Crichton, and Pamela Anderson. In the Crichton case, Burgar failed to prove to having rights to the domain name or possess legitimate reasons for its use.
Burgar is a known notorious celebrity name hacker. He is a businessman from Canada living in High Prairie, a small town in Alberta. From 1996 to 2004, he owned JRRTOLKIEN.COM until the WIPO made a verdict bringing back Tolkien full rights. Another sensational dispute that involved Burgar was the case filed against him by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem over the rights to Albert Einstein's name. Burgar had a victory over Bruce Springsteen's name making it his legitimate property, at least in the Internet.
Burgar still denies, despite the many WIPO rulings against him, that he is a thief or robber of celebrities' names. He insists that he is just a collector who happens to love collecting celebrities names and using them as a domain name. He furthers that his collecting and using celebrity domain names is not intended to do harm or any damage to their original owners. Exercising his right to freedom of speech is all he says he has been doing. But his justification for his action is actually more dubious given the fact that his business is registered under a bogus enterprise named Alberta Hot Rods. Clean intentions behind a fake business firm, Burgar must be suffering from great denial.
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