Comic artist Jeph Jacques was so amused when the .horse top-level domain was created that he decided to make a new website: walmart.horse. The site portrayed an unexplainably funny picture of a horse in front of a Wal-Mart store (above).

Wal-Mart didn't get the joke. In March, they sent Jacques a cease-and-desist letter telling him that the site infringed their trademark. Jacques responded, saying his site was fair use because the horsey site was an "obvious parody." If Wal-Mart had other animals it wanted to add to the website, he added cheekily, "I would happily comply!"

Two months later, Wal-Mart had enough of this horsing around. The company didn't drop the issue, instead filing papers with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and initiating a domain name dispute. It's a procedure that's meant to knock out cybersquatters.

The initiation of a formal legal process was more than Jacques was willing to put up with.

"I didn't feel like fighting them anymore," Jacques, who draws the comic Questionable Content, told The Guardian. The site has been owned by Wal-Mart since Monday, the newspaper reported.

On his tumblr, Jacques posted the above picture of a horse skeleton, and wrote: rip.horse :'(

Now, would Jacques have won his case? That's a horse of a different color. "Fair use" can be a defense to both copyright and trademark claims. If the proceeding had played out, Wal-Mart would have had to show the domain name was registered in "bad faith," trademark lawyer Roberto Ledesma told The Guardian.