St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

British international striker Wayne Rooney has won ownership of a Web site in his name. Rooney, a soccer star who plays for Manchester United, won exclusive rights to domain name waynerooney.com after proving his name was a registered trademark, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said.

The website at the above address appears to hastily deleted all of it’s content as of today. In the source code there are still adverts but they don’t display on the page. There’s also JavaScript for navigation that doesn’t display on the page.

The ruling in the cybersquatting case, decided by an arbitrator named by WIPO, found that Huw Marshall had registered the site in bad faith in April 2002 and had “no rights or legitimate interests” in it.

Marshall, a Welsh actor and fan of Rooney’s first club Everton, claimed he had recognized the young striker’s “star properties” early on. He had wanted to set up a non-commercial fan site but lost interest when Rooney moved to Manchester.

Arbitrator Tony Willoughby wrote he was “unable to accept that Marshall had no eye to the potential commercial benefit” and ordered the contested site transferred to Rooney.

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