Pfizer, maker of the impotence wonder-drug Viagra, on Friday won a court order stopping an independent porn-site operator from using the viagrafalls.com domain name.
The Federal District Court for the Maryland District ordered Jon and Cherie Messner, operators of the Wetlands pornographic Web site, to drop viagrafalls.com from the list of about 120 domains they use to steer users to the Wetlands site.
The Messners, who for months refused to heed cease-and-desist letters from Pfizer, complied with the court's order.
"I deleted all the pages, and put up a note saying that we'd received a court order to take the site down," Jon Messner said. "I can't believe how upset they are about this."
Messner's battle with Pfizer (PFE) isn't over yet, though. The company is seeking damages for injury to the Viagra brand.
"They say I've besmirched their good name," said Messner. "That seems sort of ridiculous if you think about it, though. The product they're offering and the product I'm offering are kind of complementary."
The Maryland-based Wetlands' slogan is "where wives get naked." It features the real McCoys, including Cherie Messner, who strip for the camera. "The Wetlands is like a mythical community where everybody's young and they swing," Messner said in an interview before the injunction.
It attracts a lot of eyeballs. The site gets 165,000 to 275,000 unique visitors a day, Messner said. He and his wife, he claimed, make from US$8,000 to $12,000 a day before costs. The loss of viagrafalls.com will barely put a dent in the site's traffic, Messner claimed.
Pfizer couldn't be reached immediately for comment.
The domain dustup is the latest in a string of battles between corporations and domain-name holders. Recently, consumer goods company Colgate-Palmolive, which makes Ajax cleaner, gave up its fight for the ajax.org domain. Last April, the Prema Toy Company asked a 12-year-old boy to turn over his pokey.org domain name, arguing it was a dilution of the orange horse cartoon character's trademark. Art Clokey, creator of Gumby and Pokey, ended that fight. Domains like mtv.com and mcdonalds.com have also been subjects of heated battles.
Lawyers had expected Pfizer to prevail in this particular case.
"A trademark owner has certain rights to the mark they've registered. One of those rights is not to have it diluted," said Ken Wilson, attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California.
