The Las Vegas Sun has reported that Majestic Star Casino LLC filed suit against three entities doing business in Panama in federal court in Las Vegas on Wednesday. The owner of Fitzgeralds casinos in Nevada, Mississippi and Colorado has filed a lawsuit against the operator of a website that has a similar name to the online home of its Las Vegas casino. The only difference is three little letters, “.net” instead of “.com”.
The Majestic Star Casino LLC is contending that the names are way too similar and as a result the alleged impostors are using the name to drive traffic towards online gambling. The Majestic Star Casino is privately owned and based in Las Vegas, and interestingly enough, is the largest black-owned casino operator in the United States and the first and only black-owned casino in Las Vegas Nevada.
This isn’t the first time and it likely won’t be the last time that lawsuits of this nature are filed out of Las Vegas. At the beginning of this year MGM filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court charging that six individuals were operating an online gambling website that infringed on the trademarks of its MGM Grand hotels and casinos. The website was also used to drive traffic towards online gambling.
You hate to state the obvious, but this is what happens when there’s a grey area in regulation as big as the Grand Canyon.
