The Strange And Sad Saga Of Nissan.com
"[A]ll of the resources from America's oldest investment firm are available online," explains an earnest pitchman played by Chris Parnell in an October 1999 "Saturday Night Live" commercial parody for Dillon/Edwards Investments, a fictional financial firm. "Dillon/Edwards on the Internet, at www.clownpenis.fart. A lot of investment companies rushed onto the Internet, but Dillon and Edwards took their time. Sure, when they were ready, there was one web address left, but it's one you can count on."
More than 24 years later, given the intended joke, you'd expect it to, if anything, land better now. But thanks to a mix of creativity and more top-level domain names with the cachet of .com becoming available and popular, the concept of "running out of domain names" isn't a thing that anyone is concerned about anymore. That doesn't mean that there can't be conflicts over desirable domains, though.
In June 2023, the estate of the late Uzi Nissan, the original owner of Nissan.com and Nissan.net, filed a lawsuit over the misappropriation of his domain names, extending a saga that's been going on for decades. More specifically, the ordeal goes back to 1999, when Nissan Motor Corporation, the car manufacturer, sued Uzi's Nissan Computer Corporation, resulting in a legal battle that lasted the better part of a decade and became centric to the public narrative of his life. What's the whole story, and how did we get here? It's complicated.
Who was Uzi Nissan?
According to the articles of incorporation on file with North Carolina's Secretary of State, Uzi Nissan's Nissan Computer Corporation was formed in May 1991. roughly three months before August 1991's public launch of the World Wide Web. (He used Nissan in business as far back as 1980 for an auto shop before the Datsun transitioned to the Nissan brand name in the U.S.) Two years later, in July 1991, he put up the money to help launch Computer Digest, a local publication that was to compete with the more established Triangle Computer News. It was a few days short of his company's third birthday in May 1994 that, according to WHOIS records, Uzi Nissan purchased the domain name Nissan.com, with Nissan.net following in March 1996.
Trouble came when the Nissan Motor Corporation sued him in December 1999, alleging that Uzi Nissan had shown the bad faith required for an Anticybersquatting Act complaint despite his obvious claims to the name. How? He offered to sell the domains to the Japanese auto company for $15 million, which he insisted to Computerworld was a joke. "They want to crush me and get it for nothing," he said. "I feel that they are pressuring me to give it up."
Uzi Nissan solicited assistance with the lawsuit at NCCHelp.org, which contained a statement he issued on December 15, 1999, shortly after the lawsuit was filed. "Nissan Motors is trying to bankrupt me and my companies by forcing me to cease using the Nissan name and incurring the high cost of mounting a defense," he said. "It seems I don't have a chance. I stand to lose the business I worked very hard at building for the past nine years."
The car company had more of a case than you might think
Though Nissan.com was launched as the website for Uzi Nissan's computer sales and repair business, the website as it sat when he was sued by Nissan Motor Corporation muddies the waters as far as potential bad faith. A November 22, 1999, Wayback Machine capture of Nissan.com shows that, just a few weeks before the lawsuit was filed, the site resembled a cybersquatting endeavor much more than it did the official website of a business with Nissan in the name because it was the owner's surname.
Though there was a "Click Here for PC Hardware" link that took you to the main Nissan Computer Corporation page, it was nowhere near as prominent as various referral link banners or the sidebar that included links for "Car Quotes," "Autos," "Auto Racing," and "Off Road" among other, non-automotive topics. Other cached copies indicate this was a relatively recent change, as the October 13, 1999 version didn't have the same car-heavy emphasis and displayed the Nissan Computer Corporation links more prominently.
Nissan.net, meanwhile, has a long enough gap between caches that it's harder to say with any certainty what it looked like when the lawsuit was filed, but the last cache before and the first cache after the lawsuit reflect a website that was transparently for a computer store.
Nissan Motor won an early legal victory
According to an August 2000 Triangle Business Journal article about the lawsuit, the car company got an injunction against Uzi Nissan, requiring him to say on Nissan.com that he was not affiliated with the car company and link their then-domain, NissanDriven.com. (Going by Wayback Machine caches, this was around April 2000.)
"This web site is owned by Nissan Computer Corp and it is not affiliated with the Japanese Automaker, Nissan Motor Co., or with its North American subsidiary, Nissan North America, Inc.," read the disclaimer. "Nissan North America's website is located at nissan-na.com." By May 10, this changed to a more prominent "Not affiliated with Nissan Motors. For Nissan Motors see 'nissan-na.com.'"
"They offered me $75,000 to $100,000 for it at one time, but I've made it clear I'm not in the business of selling domain names," he told Triangle Business Journal. "I also told them if they want to buy my company, that's a different matter. They didn't like that, and they sued."
The lawsuit got a lot of media coverage
In the meantime, Uzi Nissan gave further details to the Raleigh News and Observer a few weeks after the Journal article. There, he claimed that the car company first sent him a letter "expressing concern" in 1995 and didn't follow up into the fall of 1999, when the company called and later visited him with an offer to buy the domains. Uzi indicated that he wasn't interested, he said, so they sued him.
"This isn't an effort to drive him out of business," Nissan Motors lawyer David Schindler told the News and Observer. "It's an effort to stop him from making money off someone else's good will." Schindler also added that his clients had registered NissanComputer.com in November 1999 and offered it to Uzi for free, but clearly, he wasn't interested. Schindler also asserted that Uzi put car ads on Nissan.com to confuse and exploit visitors who were seeking out Nissan Motors, something he denied, claiming that less than 25% of his advertisers had car-related products.
As the lawsuit made its way through the court system, both sides saw some victories. In November 2002, the judge ruled that Uzi had diluted Nissan Motor's trademark but also ruled that he could continue using the domains as long as they weren't used for commerce or anti-Nissan Motor content. Later rulings indicate that Uzi made a massive mistake in adding car-related content and ads to his site in late 1999, with judges citing that as the line he crossed in diluting Nissan Motor's trademark.
Unofficially, Uzi came out on the winning end...
The ongoing media coverage died down around 2002, with the next major update coming in an April 2005 Los Angeles Times story. According to that report, in an August 2004 ruling, Uzi Nissan was again ordered not to display any car-related advertising but also allowed to run other ads and criticize Nissan Motor. Nissan Motor's appeal was rejected, sending the underlying case back to the federal district court. Eventually, the case went to trial in March 2007, with the presiding judge deciding the case instead of a jury.
In Judge Dean D. Pregerson's subsequent findings of fact and conclusions of law that decided the case, he ended up siding with Nissan Computer, although officially, there was no prevailing party in the lawsuit. Though Pregerson did concede that Nissan Computer's "brief period of apparent exploitation" by putting car-related ads on Nissan.com "cuts against Nissan Computer," the judge felt that Uzi's long history of using his surname in business outweighed that brief indiscretion when it came to determining his intent.
Citing, among other evidence, expert testimony that showed the vast majority of potential Nissan customers were not encountering Nissan.com, Pregerson ruled that Nissan Computer's use of "Nissan" was not dilutive and refused to extend Nissan Motor's temporary injunction governing Nissan.com's content to permanent status. By this point, Nissan.com was a page for Nissan Computer that also linked information about the lawsuit, and after the lawsuit was finally over, that did not change.
[Featured image by Federal Bureau of Investigation via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | Public Domain]
...but Uzi didn't feel like he won
Uzi Nissan's fight for the Nissan.com and Nissan.net domain names was over, and for the next decade or so, he was largely quiet, breaking his silence for a February 2018 Jalopnik.com article.
"[Nissan Motor] knew that in the jury trial, they were going to lose," Uzi told Jalopnik, explaining how the case ended with a bench trial. "So, at the last minute, they agreed to take off the $10 million damages and go to a bench trial only for [an] injunction, like to win nissan.com. [...] Nissan Motor, from the beginning, said they didn't have any problems with me using Nissan Computer. [...] They had a problem with me using nissan.com. They wanted it." Uzi further claimed that Nissan Motor had tried to buy the domains from him twice after the end of the lawsuit, but Nissan Motor declined to comment on past litigation when reached by Jalopnik.
In assessing the impact that the lawsuit had on him, Uzi said that he and his family spent nearly $3 million on defending the case for almost eight years. He also felt that it damaged his core computer business, both by way of monopolizing his time and giving the company bad publicity. "It's not the question of if the big guys can prevail or not; it's what will happen to you from the time you get sued until you can, I don't call it win," he concluded. "All I have is the domain name, but everything else I have less. So, as a matter of fact, I lost also."
More recently, the story took a strange turn
Uzi Nissan died in July 2020 after he contracted COVID-19, and that's where the story gets especially peculiar. In June 2023, his estate filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Virginia, naming his domains and a John Doe as the defendants. In the complaint, Uzi's estate alleges that at some point after his death, "a thief (Defendant John Doe) gained unauthorized access to Mr. Nissan's domain name management account and stole the domain names."
Since the WHOIS data shows both domains as still being owned by Nissan Computer, it appears that the suggestion is that someone figured out Uzi's password for his registrar (GKG), logged into his account, and changed the domain name pointers/redirects without changing the ownership info. Nissan.com and Nissan.net don't go anywhere as of this writing, but Wayback Machine caches suggest that something changed between April 22, 2022 (the last cache showing Uzi's website about the lawsuit) and the following May 10 (the first cache showing a very plain web page that simply listed the site's contact email address).
By August 26, the old website returned with the contact email placed prominently atop the home page, but it reverted to just the email address on June 23, 2023, three days before the lawsuit was filed. And by July 20, it was (seemingly) spamming ad copy for Auddia's Faidr app, which promises ad-free AM/FM radio broadcasts. And by October 7, it was redirecting to a stock tips website before eventually going nowhere. The lawsuit is still pending but has been dormant since August, so this story has to end with "to be continued..." for now.