President Obama's dark money group Organizing for Action (OFA) lost its bid last week to control the website domain OrganizingforAction.net.
When former campaign officials announced the restructuring of the president's reelection campaign into a tax-exempt 501(c)(4), a Colorado man quickly purchased the domain on Jan. 18 and redirected the traffic to the National Rifle Association website.
In response, OFA filed an ultimately doomed complaint, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday:
Instead, a lawyer with the firm Perkins Coie, representing Organizing for Action, filed a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum, which handles disputes over domain names. [...]
In a decision issued last week, Karl V. Fink, a retired judge in Ann Arbor, Mich., concluded that Organizing for Action did not provide evidence that the name was "a distinctive identifier" of the group or that it owned any trademarks at the time.
(In fact, the group did not file a trademark registration for "Organizing for Action" until Feb. 7, according to United States Patent and Trademark Office records.)
The site currently redirects to video of Dr. Ben Carson's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast.