Site owner says AOL’s wow.com is confusing his users.

      Late last year AOL converted its WOW.com domain name from a World of Warcraft site to a daily deals site similar to Groupon. Now the owner of daily deals site WowWhatSavings.com is crying foul in a lawsuit (pdf).

      WowWhatSavings.com owner Todd Rideman says his deals site has been known as “WoW” to its users. Once AOL launched Wow.com, confusion ensued. He provides an affidavit from a Boston restaurant that said it was confused when approached by Wow.com about placing a coupon, and that some of his users mistakenly thought offers on Wow.com were actually from his web site.

      Although this alone may be a stretch, Rideman says he was introduced to a Patch.com employee (a subsidiary of AOL) who he told about his site before AOL launched Wow.com. He alleges that the AOL employee said he would “talk to his AOL bosses” about possibly working with WowWhatSavings.com.

      If this were some AOL executive then this may be a “gotcha”. Or if WowWhatSavings.com was a unique idea it might also be a compelling case. But the AOL employee is just a regional publisher for Patch.com. And let’s face it, WowWhatSavings.com is not an original idea.

      Sounds like a long shot to me.

Source from Domain Name Wire