Battle Of The Keith Urbans And Rick Rubin Takes On Ray Stevens

Representatives for Keith Urban (singer) have tried repeatedly to buy the keithurban.com domain from the painter. While I agree that the primary motivation for the lawsuit is obtaining the domain, it’s pretty clear that Keith the painter relies on confusion with Keith the singer to direct traffic to his site. Otherwise, why reject what has to be a generous offer for rights to the domain?

So the painter was on the web first. I assumed as much, as the singer’s people would’ve tried to get the dot com name when they launched his site. So what? That doesn’t give the painter a right to piggyback on the singer’s celebrity. Why does the painter have references to Disney and Disney world in his meta tags? From what I can see, it has nothing ot do with the page content except for the large ad at the top. Why is every related site that’s listed on the directory Brady linked to a country music artists’ site? Given that keithurban.com has nothing to do with country music, it would seem that the painter is indeed benefitting from the confusion. For what it’s worth, I looked at archived versions of the site and for several months in 2002 it included a front page graphic of a young girl holding a guitar, with the caption “this is the latest digital art of my neice (Kayla Urban) who just turned 5.”

I agree that Keith the singer is suing solely because his attempts to buy a domain that he dearly wants failed. Keith the painter has every right to the domain. However, it seems to me that he has written elements into the text and HTML of his site to perpetuate confusion with the celebrity or other things unassociated with his work and has done nothing with his website content to alleviate confusion that was obviously occuring. He left himself open to the singer’s extreme measures to get the domain he wants.

Good points, Brady. The bottom line is that I know that Keith Urban’s people desperately want the domain and that it would be quite valuable to them and thus I assume that they have made the offers they have made to the painter to buy the domain have been very generous. I am confused as to why the painter would hold on to such a sparse site that does not appear to be generating much revenue when there is so much to be gained by simply picking another domain name. Thus, I feel the need to rationalize it.

A question for those in the know: I would presume that many people visit log on to the internet looking for Keith Urban’s site and simply type in “keithurban.com,” and thus land on the painter’s site. Thus, even if the painter is not actually being confused with the singer, his site is receiving a disproportionatly high number of hits. Could this be impacting the site’s ad revenue such that it is profitable for the owner to resist selling the domain?