The trademarked name of a respected online watchdog organization, HateWatch, is at the crux of a heated dispute between two Web sites with similar Net addresses, nearly identical front-page graphics, and very different outlooks.
The original HateWatch site -- at hatewatch.org -- tracks intolerance online by serving up an index of more than 200 groups dedicated to racial and national bigotry, from the Aryan Dating Page to the Nation of Islam homepage.
The first URL listed in the HateWatch directory of "anti-gay" sites is Don Ellis' American Guardian, and it's Ellis -- one of the most vociferous opponents of abortion and homosexual rights on IRC and the Web -- who has launched a look-alike site, called HateWatch of America, at hatewatch.com and hatewatch.net.
HateWatch founder David Goldman says he is preparing to go to court to defend his brand.
A chilling portrait of a Ku Klux Klan member in a white hood delivering the Sieg Heil salute adorns both sites, an image that Goldman says he has exclusive rights to. Like the original site, HateWatch of America offers an index of sites broken down by category.
You won't find the NAACP or the Disney corporation listed on the original site, however, as they are on Ellis'. The NAACP is tagged as a "racist" group there, while Disney is slammed as "anti-children" for publishing a book called Growing Up Gay through its subsidiary, Hyperion, and for hosting "gay days" at Disneyland. The American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way, and the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Teachers Network are lumped in the same category with NAMBLA and a chat page for pedophiles, while the original HateWatch site is condemned as "anti-Christian."
Ellis, an auto-body mechanic from Star City, Arkansas, doesn't dispute that his site causes confusion among those who simply type "hatewatch" into their browser window and land in his domain. He even created a feedback address, "comments@hatewatch.com," that mirrors the one on Goldman's site.
"I get lots of his mail. People don't even think about .org," he says. "I got email from this one girl who told me she'd been to hatewatch.org and said, 'Your content has completely changed. My God, you've listed the Anti-Defamation League!' So I emailed her back and said, 'We're Christian-based.' And I gave her the other address."
Goldman trademarked the name HateWatch in Massachusetts, and has applied with the US Patent and Trademark Office for a federal trademark. Ellis, however, has also trademarked HateWatch -- in Arkansas.
"We got lawyers, and we know enough about copyright to make our case," Ellis says. "We get all kinds of lawsuit threats, and my attorney just laughs at them. 'HateWatch' is a trademark of the American Guardian now."
At issue, Ellis says, is who gets to decide what is bigotry on the Net.
"[Goldman] sits up there in his office, and he goes to somebody's site and says, 'That's a hate site,' and it's so," Ellis observes. "You start condemning, and pretty soon people believe you. That's a tactic that was used by Hitler. To me, the KKK is no different than the NAACP."
Ellis finds Goldman's complaint that HateWatch of America is using the graphic of the Klansman particularly ironic.
"Look at his site. He used my picture and my text to call me a hate site. He uses everybody's pictures and texts," Ellis points out.
Goldman's site launched in May 1995, as a page of links to sites promoting racial supremacy, such as Stormfront. Goldman, who was a researcher at the Harvard Law School Library when he put the project on a university server, says he was surprised when the page suddenly started getting lots of traffic.
"This subject matter was a niche that was not being dealt with," Goldman recalls. "The Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish Defense League were keeping an eye on those groups for their own constituencies, but no one was doing it for the online constituency, which was growing."
A year and a half later, HateWatch incorporated as an independent organization and moved to its own server. Now, the site has grown into an online multimedia center, offering text, audio, and video on such topics as the treatment of the Roma people in contemporary Europe, the slaughter of Armenians in 1922, and an interview with Gabi Clayton, whose 17-year-old son committed suicide in 1995 after being attacked for being gay.
Goldman insists that HateWatch is free of any agenda other than its stated mission, which is "combating and containing online bigotry." For adding the Jewish Defense League to his index, Goldman was branded "Pig of the Month" by a JDL chapter in Florida.
"A bigot is a bigot," Goldman says.
Ellis doesn't dispute that he's no friend of gay people. A guest editorial on his site depicts San Francisco as a city where photographs of children are displayed in store windows as an indication that kids are for sale for sex inside.
And the Net, he says, has been "a huge success" for homosexuals. "Before, they didn't know whose leg they could rub on."
Besides, homosexuals themselves spew hatred, he declares: "Do you know what they call pregnant women? Breeders."
There are other forms of prejudice that Ellis doesn't abide. For a long time, Ellis has supported his friend Patrick Blakely -- infamous on Usenet and Internet Relay Chat as RevWhite -- in his online harassment campaigns against suspected pedophiles and defenders of gays, but Ellis takes credit for convincing Blakely to take down a viciously racist site of his own called the Negroid Research Institute.
"I'm just an old country boy from a town of 2,000 in the Bible Belt," Ellis explains. "Down here in Dixie, 37 percent of the people are black."
Precedent would suggest that Ellis might be able to keep his URLs if the case goes to court. Milton Mueller, author of a study that will be published in July called Trademarks and Domain Names: Property Rights and Institutional Evolution in Cyberspace, says that when domain names disputes go to trial, the findings have been two to one in favor of the current holder of the domain.
Mueller also says, however, that a case like this -- where part of Ellis' intent is to create a decoy site to confuse unwary netsurfers -- is "precisely what trademark laws are for."
Ringling Brothers recently compelled People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to take down its Web site at ringlingbrothers.com by filing a "deceptive trademark" suit. The PETA site -- critical of the treatment of animals in the circus -- was dismantled after Ringling Brothers agreed to drop the suit.
Goldman says that if Ellis had launched a site called "Monitoring HateWatch," he would have had no problem with it.
"I invite people to refute our stance," he says. "But I have a question when someone tries to convince people that they are the site that we spent two years building."
