4th Circuit decision in a typosquatting/gripe site case

Last week the 4th Circuit decided against Jerry Falwell in a case concerning an individual who operated http://www.fallwell.com/ as a gripe site to criticize Falwell's views on certain issues.

In Lamparello v. Falwell, No. 04-2011 (4th Cir. Aug. 24, 2005), the court addressed claims under both the Lanham Act for TM infringement and the Anti-Cybersquatting Act. The parties stipulated that Lamparello never sold any goods or services on his website, but that at one point he had a link to Amazon.com's page offering a book that contained views consistent with Lamparello's and contrary to Falwell's on certain issues.

As to the Lanham Act claim, the Court declined to decide whether, as Lamparello argued, the Lanham Act applies only to "commercial speech" as that term is understood under 1st Amendment law, deciding instead that there was no likelihood of confusion based on the appearance of the Lamparello's web site.

The Court then analyzed Falwell's "initial interest confusion" argument separate from the regular likelihood of confusion analysis. The court sort of pooh-poohed the argument initially, calling it a "relatively new and sporadically applied doctrine" -- sporadically applied? I thought at least half the circuits explicitly accepted it -- noting that the 4th Circuit had never applied it. But then the Court sidestepped an "up or down vote" (to use a buzzword used a lot in certain political contexts these days) on the doctrine, holding that, whether it's a valid legal theory under the Lanham Act or not, it would apply only where the defendant competes with the plaintiff for sales. While I'm usually not a big fan of the 4th Circuit's trademark jurisprudence, this distinction seems to make some sense to me.

Finally, in a long but pretty uninteresting discussion, the 4th Circuit decided that Lamparello didn't meet the "bad faith" standard in the Cybersquatting Act.