Talk show host and one-man media empire Glenn Beck has lost his bid to shut down the glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com domain name.

We've covered the strange circumstances of the case before: a Gilbert Gottfried comedy routine (NSFW) about Bob Saget raping and murdering a teenaged girl made its way to the Fark forums, where commenters quickly adapted it for use with Glenn Beck. The idea is to force someone to explain away completely baseless charges made by insinuation alone; since Beck already has a reputation for doing this, the joke was supposed to give Beck a taste of his own medicine.

But when one Isaac Eiland-Hall turned the joke into a website, Beck's lawyers went after it, claiming that it infringed on Beck's trademarked name and should be turned over to Beck immediately. Eiland-Hall enlisted lawyer Marc Randazza to draft one of the oddest World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) domain name arbitration responses we've ever read, but Randazza announced on his blog last Friday that the filling had paid off—WIPO's arbiter ruled against Beck (PDF, via TechDirt).

While agreeing that the site included Beck's trademark, the arbiter noted that "even a 'moron in a hurry' would not likely conclude that Complainant sponsored, endorsed, or was affiliated with the website addressed by the disputed domain name."

But the bigger question was whether Beck's trademark was being used in a legitimate way, or whether it had been registered in bad faith. (The decision cites, as an example of bad faith, a case in which an auto parts company targeted its competition with a [competitor]sucks.com website that sent traffic to the first company.)

"Respondent appears to the Panel to be engaged in a parody of the style or methodology that Respondent appears genuinely to believe is employed by Complainant in the provision of political commentary," says the decision, "and for that reason Respondent can be said to be making a political statement. This constitutes a legitimate noncommercial use of Complainant's mark."

While WIPO refused to turn over the domain name to Beck, the arbiter did note that he was taking no position on whether the domain name or the site contents might be "defamation." That decision can only be made by a US court, though Beck's lawyers have not so far sought to push the question.

After winning the WIPO dispute, Eiland-Hall decided to poke the beehive one last time. He issued a public letter (PDF) to Glenn Beck which opens by noting that "I have prevailed in the WIPO action that you filed against me. I write now to voluntarily relinquish the disputed domain to you, even though you did not win the case."

The letter goes on to critique Beck's willingness to "pander to the fears and insecurities of your audience," the fact that he "denigrated the letter of First Amendment law," and the way his lawyers attracted even more attention to the site by filing the WIPO complaint. The letter ends by providing the domain username and password to Beck's lawyers, and the domain name is currently dead.

Not that Eiland-Hall actually pulled the plug on his parody; it's still up and running at GB1990.com, where Eiland-Hall touts the fact that "WE WON!" and then wishes Beck a speedy recovery from his recent bout of appendicitis.

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