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LAWS in the US against “cyber-squatting” came under fire last week when a
white supremacist group registered the domain name
www.martinlutherking.org/
and set up the website to masquerade as a legitimate civil rights information
resource.

Yet although this is a clear case of cyber-squatting, the new legislation,
passed only last November to prevent precisely this sort of occurrence, is
powerless to act.

Hosted by Stormfront.org, an online white supremacist organisation which is
long established, the website is ostensibly a “historical examination” of the
assassinated civil rights leader’s life. In fact, it is peddling its own view of
history under this innocuous guise.

To help them along, the hosts included key words in the website’s meta-tag
information, which is what search engines use to classify websites.
Consequently, popular search engines often place the site high on their list of
searches for “Martin Luther King”.

The problem is that the law doesn’t cover people who are already dead, says
Internet lawyer Mark Owen of Harbottle and Lewis in London. Unlike Brad Pitt,
who recently filed a lawsuit under the legislation, King’s name could only be
protected by establishing personality rights, as has been done in the case of
Elvis Presley.

Personality rights are designed to prevent people from siphoning off the
publicity of others. But establishing them is not straightforward and it is
unclear whether such a tactic would succeed over Stormfront.org’s right to
freedom of expression.

“To stop someone using a domain name you have got to have a right over it,”
says Owen. But this is difficult with personal names because more than one
person can share that name.