The ongoing media coverage died down around 2002, with the next major update coming in an April 2005 Los Angeles Times story. According to that report, in an August 2004 ruling, Uzi Nissan was again ordered not to display any car-related advertising but also allowed to run other ads and criticize Nissan Motor. Nissan Motor’s appeal was rejected, sending the underlying case back to the federal district court. Eventually, the case went to trial in March 2007, with the presiding judge deciding the case instead of a jury.
In Judge Dean D. Pregerson’s subsequent findings of fact and conclusions of law that decided the case, he ended up siding with Nissan Computer, although officially, there was no prevailing party in the lawsuit. Though Pregerson did concede that Nissan Computer’s “brief period of apparent exploitation” by putting car-related ads on Nissan.com “cuts against Nissan Computer,” the judge felt that Uzi’s long history of using his surname in business outweighed that brief indiscretion when it came to determining his intent.
Citing, among other evidence, expert testimony that showed the vast majority of potential Nissan customers were not encountering Nissan.com, Pregerson ruled that Nissan Computer’s use of “Nissan” was not dilutive and refused to extend Nissan Motor’s temporary injunction governing Nissan.com’s content to permanent status. By this point, Nissan.com was a page for Nissan Computer that also linked information about the lawsuit, and after the lawsuit was finally over, that did not change.
[Featured image by Federal Bureau of Investigation via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | Public Domain]
