Riot wins one battle in the fight against domain squatters, with more clashes to come.
League of Legends, the fantasy RTS that has become the most popular PC title in the whole darn world, has had to endure the humiliation of domain squatting until recently. The website LeagueOfLegends.co – no ‘m’ – had been snapped up by Martin Hornak who used it to funnel people to porn sites. Riot filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization, but that complaint has now been terminated and Riot has gained control over the domain name.
This isn’t the only domain problem on Riot’s ‘to do’ list. Another site – unrelated to .co – which Riot has a grief with is LeagueofLegendsPorn.com, a somewhat less sophisticated title than .co. As yet the domain itself goes nowhere in particular, but Riot has filed another WIPO complaint to deal with this pesky irritant. The LeagueofLegendsPorn.com case is still pending, but the .co complaint is marked as Terminated on the WIPO site. Terminated, in this context, means that the parties reached a settlement before the case could come to judgement, but details of that settlement have yet to be revealed.
The last time something like this affected Riot and its insanely popular RTS, it was to do with the site support.leagueoflegends.com. In that instance Riot successfully proved that the owner of the disputed site had acted in bad faith. The WIPO panel also noted that “the Complainant has presented uncontested evidence that after registration of the disputed domain name the Respondent subsequently changed the function of the associated website in order to persuade Internet users who visit the said website unknowingly to download malware.” In that same month, Riot had to tell its customers that their accounts had been hacked; all the more reason to take any domain squatter seriously.
