Message-ID: <38413728.C3561D9F@usa.healthnet.org> Date: Sun, 28 Nov 1999 09:07:36 -0500 From: Holly Ladd <mailto:hladd@usa.healthnet.org> Subject: SatelLife- HealthNet in Fight for Identity To: mailto:DEVEL-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
Dear Colleagues: SatelLife - HealthNet is in a fight for its life and its identity. A California HMO that goes by the name of HealthNet has decided to invest $20 million to develop their internet business. And we, along with a lot of other small organizations, are in their way. We decided to stand firm and defend our use of the name HealthNet to define our electronic network of health workers around the globe. We believe that we can win this fight on the merits, and that we must win this fight.We need help. People need to know about this case and need to express their opinions to the HMO and to others who seek to dominate the Internet for commercial purposes and the expense of humanitarian work. We also need financial help to sustain the legal case and keep our programs operating at the same time. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions about this case or about our work.
Sincerely, Holly Ladd Executive Director SatelLife (www.healthnet.org)
Group fight for Internet name - HMO takes on tiny health network By Karen Hsu, Globe Correspondent, 11/26/99
The fight pits a tiny nonprofit Watertown agency that helps doctors working in the Third World against the mighty muscle of a California HMO.
They are battling over an Internet address - healthnet.org - that the agency calls a lifeline to doctors in rural places overseas, and the HMO says it needs to serve its 2.2 million members. The HMO, Health Net in California, already has two Web sites using similar names, healthnet.com and healthnet.net. Now it wants to claim healthnet.org as well.
Trouble is, that name is owned by SatelLife, founded in 1985 by Nobel Prize winner and cardiologist Dr. Bernard Lown of Newton. It uses a low-cost e-mail network to connect health care workers in rural clinics and hospitals around the globe. Last week, SatelLife filed an action in federal court in Boston to preserve its Internet name, healthnet.org, two days before the company overseeing Internet name rights would have frozen SatelLife's healthnet.org moniker.
Holly Ladd, executive director of SatelLife, said it has operated the information network under the name HealthNet for at least a decade, and the health care providers it serves in the developing world consider it their ''lifeline.'' About 38,000 pieces of e-mail pass through its support operations in 164 countries every day.
''It has taken us a decade to build our reputation as an unbiased source of health information. It's not something we can walk away from and think there is no impact,'' Ladd said. As for the Health Net HMO, its members can use the Web site to access benefits information, search for doctors available through the network, and receive general health information.
Problems arise with similar Web site names because the Internet breaks down geographic boundaries, noted Dan Niccum, vice president of public affairs at Health Net. ''A California consumer can look up on the Internet for health benefits and could end up with a site on information for Third World countries,'' Niccum said.
Niccum suggests that SatelLife switch to healthnetwork.org, but Ladd said such a name switch would be costly.
If SatelLife had done a trademark search when it first started using the name HealthNet for its e-mail network, Niccum said, the nonprofit would have found that the name had already been registered as a trademark by the HMO in 1981. Niccum said the California HMO has undertaken dozens of efforts to get the many other entities using ''healthnet'' in their names or e-mail addresses to change their name, and in almost all cases, the companies have changed the name.
''The motives and work by SatelLife are admirable, but unfortunately they are violating our trademark in using healthnet in their domain name,'' Niccum said.
In September, federal judge Douglas P. Woodlock in Boston ruled that toy maker Hasbro Inc.'s ownership of the trademark ''Clue'' for its board game does not automatically entitle it to take away tiny Colorado-based Clue Computing's Internet address ''clue.com,'' and that competing use of the domain name does not dilute Hasbro's trademark. In the decision, Woodlock wrote, ''Holders of a famous mark are not automatically entitled to use that mark as their domain name; trademark law does not support such a monopoly.''
Jonathan Zittrain, a lecturer in cyberlaw at Harvard and executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said he thinks the California HMO has a weak case. But the real problem, he said, is that some such disputes still have to be decided by the court, and that is the last thing a small nonprofit needs.
Jessica Litman, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit who specializes in trademark and Internet law, agreed that Health Net is unlikely to win.
''Trademark law has never given trademark owners exclusive right to use the word on the Internet,'' said Litman.
This story ran on page B01 of the Boston Globe on 11/26/99. © Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company. ___________________ NB: SatelLife, through our lawyers asked for a meeting with Health Net in October. They refused to meet with us. The only compromise that they offered was that we give them our domain name and that then they would see if there was something that they could do for us. SatelLife has been eager to find a resolution short of litigation. Health Net has been unwilling to participate in a search for a resolution.
NB2: healthnetwork.org is already owned by another non-profit. HL