How Many Cyber–Eviction Notices Do You Need To Evict Cyber–Squatters?

Thanks to Congress, we now know that you can’t sue a bunch of unrelated defendants for patent infringement in the same case. The logic of that rule is that multiple defendants can be accused of infringing a patent without being accused of infringing that patent in the same way or under the same facts. Defendant A’s accused system may work quite differently from Defendant B’s.

But what if the accusation is cyber–squatting? Can a plaintiff rope dozens of cyber–squatters into the same lawsuit? Coach, the leather goods company, filed a recent complaint against 356 alleged cyber–squatters, which posed that question and got two different answers (HT: Virginia IP Law blog). A magistrate judge initially ruled that Coach could not join hundreds of accused cyber–squatters in the same suit, arguing that the evidence was not sufficient to establish that claims against all of the defendants had sufficient commonality. (There were eleven defendants that the magistrate judge found to have been properly joined.) On review, the presiding district judge reversed field, overruled the magistrate judge, and required that all of the domain names be turned over to Coach. While the district judge did not specify his reason for overruling the magistrate judge’s decision, there appear to be some potentially relevant differences between the patent and cyber–squatting contexts. While patent infringement claims require comparing individual defendant’s systems with the language of the asserted patent claims, cyber–squatting claims simply require showing that someone acquired or used a domain name associated with a qualifying mark of the plaintiff. In the former case, the devil lies in the details of the defendants’ different accused systems, which will require a separate factually intensive investigation into each separate system. In the latter case, the differences among defendants are unlikely to be either so striking or so vast.

Posted by David Swetnam-Burland