Mike Morgan’s domain name dispute with Wall Street bank (and my alum) Goldman Sachs over goldmansachs666.com has gone a little differently than most domain name disputes. As is typical, Goldman sent Morgan a legal love note (known as a “cease and desist letter”) that suggested all sorts of bad things but had little actual legal content.
I’ve actually gotten two of these in my life, one from Fannie Mae, and one from the Church of Scientology. The Fannie Mae one frankly, was scarier to me, since I was working in DC and around the turn of the century Fannie Mae owned the entire town, with almost every one of my other customers on retainer.
Often the dispute ends here because the trademark owner doesn’t really have any legal recourse, and they hope a nasty letter is sufficient to dislodge the domain. Sometimes the trademark owner files a complaint via the uniform dispute resolution process, and then depending on the facts.
What doesn’t happen? The domain name owner doesn’t usually file suit preemptively against the trademark owner to force their use of the domain to be recognized. Mike Morgan did this, and found himself in the very unenviable position of needing to press an issue in court, which often requires the good graces of the presiding judge.
Because Morgan didn’t want to aggravate the judge who was about to hear his plea, as well as not wanting to give ammunition to Goldman Sachs attorneys arguing that he was actually an infringing party, Morgan had to stop posting on his GoldmanSachs666.com domain. That exactly was what he didn’t want to do, because, as this graph shows, nobody is paying attention to him:
The blue line is Google Search relevance of “Mike Morgan”, and the red line is relevance of the search term “goldmansachs666”. Attention had waned before he had to go dark for legal positioning reasons in mid-May, and this is just going to hasten the slide.
This, of course, is the kiss of death for Morgan. Already struggling with obscurity, as this chart shows, going dark just continues to drive his anti-Goldman Sachs campaign into obscurity. It all suggests the campaign and the legal strategy wasn’t particularly well thought out from the beginning.
Mike Morgan’s larger strategy, to attract attention to his criticism of Goldman, can’t survive the silence. What he’s done to date has been to position himself with the tin foil hat crowd, instead of couching his criticism as a securities analyst. And now he's stopped using the only tool he has to rally even that audience.
I suppose someone had to try this as a tactic, but as this example shows, running a word of mouth campaign while trying to avoid angering a judge hearing your plea are two tactics that don’t go well together.
I note that Morgan has a heart attack and bypass at the end of May, which will probably sideline his campaign for a while. My best wishes to him and his family on his speedy recovery.
Disclosure: I worked at Goldman Sachs for five years. I have not done any work for them (either in computer security or in communications strategy) since my departure.
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