Slipknot has dropped a lawsuit seeking to take over the web address for its name, a day after the domain’s longtime owner claimed the band had failed to “take any action to prosecute the case.”
Slipknot filed the case last year, claiming an anonymous cybersquatter had been selling counterfeit merchandise on slipknot.com for more than two decades – leaving the band itself to use the clunkier address slipknot1.com.
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But in a motion filed in court Tuesday and obtained by Billboard, lawyers for the site said Slipknot never actually served them with the lawsuit, and never asked for extra time to do so. They said the case must be dismissed, arguing the band had “taken no steps whatsoever to effect service.”
That point is moot now: On Wednesday, court records show that Slipknot moved to voluntarily end the case. The band did so without any written explanation, and its attorneys did not immediately return a request for comment.
In a statement to Billboard, the website’s attorney, Jeffrey Neuman, confirmed that the case against his client had been dropped, but said he had “no other information as to the motivations of the band.”
“All I can say is that the owner of slipknot.com is not now, nor has he ever been, a ‘cybersquatter’ despite what the complaint states,” Neuman said. “The registrant registered the domain name slipknot.com in 2001 and has had the name for more than 24 years.”
The band sued in October, claiming the unaffiliated website had been hosting pay-for-click advertising that directs users to counterfeit Slipknot merchandise. The band claimed the site was registered to a PO box in the Cayman Islands and was designed to “trick unsuspecting visitors.”
“A fan of plaintiff or someone who otherwise wanted to purchase authorized Slipknot merchandise would undoubtedly visit the slipknot.com website assuming it belonged to plaintiff and then purchase the slipknot merchandise linked to on the site,” the band’s lawyers wrote at the time.
The case was filed under the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, a 1999 federal law that allows intellectual property owners to seize control of infringing domain names. Such cases often target anonymous entities that never respond, leading to no-show litigation and rulings that quickly transfer domain names without a fight.
But that’s not what happened with slipknot.com. The site’s owner hired Neuman, a Virginia-based attorney who specializes in internet domain policy, and said it would fight back: “Claimant is the lawful and long-time registrant of the domain name, having continuously owned and maintained it for approximately 24 years,” the lawyer wrote in November.
Two months later, the case is over – for now. In moving to drop the case, Slipknot didn’t fully end the dispute for good; instead it filed the request “without prejudice,” meaning the band could still refile the case at some point in the future.
