Rogers Cadenhead Wins Battle for Wargames.Com

Posted on February 7, 2007

Rogers Cadenhead blogs that he won a battle vs. MGM to keep his domain WarGames.com. Cadenhead runs WarGames.com as an online store for military simulation gaming enthusiasts. MGM had tried to take the domain from Cadenhead because they owns a trademark related to the 1983 film WarGames and the upcoming sequel WarGames 2: The Dead Code. Cadenhead says he had to learn a lot about Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) to hang on to his domain.

When first contacted by MGM in September, I was certain that I would win a Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) case if my ownership of the domain was challenged. I didn't know much about the UDRP, having never been involved in one of these disputes in a decade of web publishing, but I understood that it existed to stop people from grabbing domains to profit on somebody else's trademark. I got Wargames.Com to sell wargames.
The more I learned about the UDRP, the less confidence I had in winning. Most disputes end in victories for trademark holders and there's a huge number of ways that domain owners have been judged to have acted in bad faith.
Where domain owners are concerned, the UDRP's a strange game where the only winning move is not to play.

Rogers Cadenhead says he now plans to write a book about his ordeal and UDRP. He should write the book -- its quite the strategic battle he had to wage against MGM. WarGames.com also looks like a great website for those into military pc and video games.