Thursday, June 14, 2001 | 10:50 a.m.
Knot Investments, a Belize company, was hit with more lawsuits Wednesday by Las Vegas companies alleging it stole their trademarks and misdirected Internet users to its online casino, World Wide Gamble.
Three lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court charged Knot with "typopiracy" or the practice of registering variations of the domain names of well known websites with the intent of capturing traffic from Internet users who inadvertently mistype the domain name of the website they intend to visit.
Vegas.com LLC, which owns the domain name "vegas.com," said its website receives an average of more than 1 million hits daily. It sued Knot, alleging it "intentionally registered a domain name comprised of 'vegas.com' and an extra 's' " to capture and direct traffic to Knot's online gaming site at "vegass.com."
Vegas.com is the a sister company to the Las Vegas Sun.
The Sun owns the site "lasvegassun.com" and says it receives an average of more than 290,000 hits daily. The Sun also sued Knot, alleging it tried to divert the Sun's users when it linked its domain name "wwwlasvegassun.com" to World Wide Gamble.
"If the web user tried to visit the Las Vegas Sun's website and erroneously leaves out the period between 'www' and 'lasvegassun,' the user will reach Knot's website at 'www.wwwlasvegassun.com,' " the suit said.
The Sun also sued Media One Ent. Ltd. of St. Johns, Antigua, alleging it "intentionally registered a domain name 'lasvegasun.com' with a missing 's' to capture traffic to its online casino, bettingExpress, from web users who inadvertently fail to type in the 's' from 'Vegas' or 'Sun' when trying to reach the newspaper's website.
Separately, MGM MIRAGE'S Bellagio hotel-casino sued to stop Knot, Bing Obaldo, a Denton, Texas man, Miami, Fla.-based MCnet.Corp and its owners, Willy Mehu and Emily Robbins, a San Francisco woman, from infringing its trademark.
Bellagio, which said it owns the domain names "bellagio.com," "bellagioresort.com," and "bellagiolasvegas.com," accused the defendants of using its trademark to divert web users to their gaming and hotel reservations websites.
The suit said Knot registered and linked its website "wwwbellagio.com" to the online casino, World Wide Gamble.
The suit also said MCnet.corp, and Mehu allegedly linked their domain name "bellagiointernetcasino.com" to an online casino, Bellagio Internet Casinos, while Bing Obaldo linked his "bellagiocasinos.net" domain name to another online casino, Bellagio Casinos.
The hotel-casino said Emily Robbins linked her domain name "bellagiohotellasvegas.com" to an online room reservation website called HotelReservationNetwork.com and allegedly used photographs taken from Bellagio's official website and brochures.
Earlier, MGM MIRAGE'S Treasure Island hotel-casino sued Knot over Knot's website "wwwtreasureisland.com," which doesn't include the period between "www" and "treasure island" that the resort uses in its official "www.treasureisland.com" site.
The defendants could not be reached for comment on the allegations.
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