Pepsi Belatedly Wants TropicanaField.com
Seven years ago, a guy named Chris Dunne, who happens to be a big fan of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays baseball team (who play at Tropicana Field), registered the domain tropicanafield.com. He built an actual site — not a parked page filled with ads, but a real site, with information on the businesses surrounding the stadium, including accommodations, restaurants, nightclubs, and attractions.
For years, while the Rays were a losing team, PepsiCo, which owns Tropicana Products, ignored Dunne’s use of the domain. When the team came out of last place for the first time ever, Pepsi popped up and said, “Give us the domain.”
Previous case law has held that when trademark holders fail to protect their trademark in a timely manner, the theory of laches can be applied — which means, basically, “you snooze, you lose.”
Pepsi snoozed while Chris Dunne was hard at work building a useful and informative web site. Read more about this case at thedomains.com.
No related posts.