ACPA Doesn’t Apply to Vanity URLs–Athene Annuity v. Athene Group
The magistrate judge issued a default $2M+ ACPA damages award covering 160 allegedly violative “domain names.” On review, the supervising judge partially reverses, despite no objections from the defendants. In fact, only 1 of the 160 “domain names” is actually a legally regulated DOMAIN NAME. The rest are URLs with the trademark somewhere in them, which the ACPA does not cover, or URLs that don’t reference the trademark at all, which the magistrate judge excluded.
The court explains: “domain names are not necessarily equivalent to URLs (Uniform Resource Locators).” Domain names do not include “vanity URLs” where the trademark shows up in the post-domain path:
Take, for instance, one of the URLs named as a Doe Defendant in this action: https://facebook.com/Athene.Network/. Within this URL, “Athene.Network” is the vanity URL, or post-domain path. The domain name, distinct from the post-domain path, remains facebook.com.
I’m blogging this ruling because it is the second time in the past four months that I have seen a court (each time acting without a defense appearance) incorrectly treat post-domain URLs as a trademark law violation. (See my extended and angsty discussion of this issue in the Modlily v. Funlingo blog post). I can’t believe plaintiffs and courts are still making this mistake in 2025 despite a quarter-century of jurisprudence to the contrary. With respect to the ACPA, Congress was clear: the ACPA only applies to second-level domain names–not social media handles, vanity URLs, third-level domain names, or anything else.
Case Citation: Athene Annuity and Life Company v. Athene Group Ltd., 2025 WL 2426690 (D. Ariz. Aug. 22, 2025)