Moana Pacific wins cyber identity fight

By LIBBY MIDDLEBROOK

Maori fisheries company Moana Pacific has won a quick decision prohibiting a competitor from using its company name on an Internet website.

Following a complaint from Moana in March, the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) found meat and seafood company Turner New Zealand registered moanapacific.com in bad faith last July.

Icann is responsible for the technical management of the Internet, and disputes related to domain name registrations.

"They wanted the right to control their own trademark and they really wanted their own domain name back," said Moana's representative, Kim McLeod, an intellectual property specialist with AJ Park.

"They [Icann] found that Turner New Zealand had no legitimate right to the moanapacific.com domain name and that it had been registered in bad faith."

Moana is one of the first New Zealand companies to resolve a domain name registration dispute via Icann.

In March, Lion Breweries won a Swiss-based World Intellectual Property Organisation order barring a Waikato business from using its Steinlager brand as a website address.

Mr McLeod said the new Icann disputes mechanism allowed companies and groups to resolve disputes more quickly and cheaply than through the court system. He estimated that Moana, which spent less than $10,000 on the case, may have saved $40,000 by using Icann to resolve the dispute rather than the court system.

"The great thing about this new disputes mechanism is that it aims to get a result within 60 days and avoids the cost and delay of going to court. If this case was fought through the New Zealand courts, you could be looking at in excess of $50,000, depending on the reaction from the other party."

Neither Turner, which is based in the United States and 100 per cent owned by Whangarei man Noel Turner, nor Moana representatives could be contacted for comment.