The investment-banking giant wants goldmansachs666.com to find a new URL. Goldman Sachs is out to stop investment advisor Michael Morgan from using a web address -- goldmansachs666.com -- the investment bank says impinges on its trademark. The URL in question opens a blog called Goldman Sachs Information, Comments, Opinions and Factsthat Morgan launched on 26 March 2009 to highlight, for starters, what he sees as Goldman's responsibility for the financial and economic crisis.

"Your use of the mark GOLDMAN SACHS violates several of Goldman Sachs' intellectual property rights, constitutes an act of trademark infringement, unfair competition and implies a relationship and misrepresents commercial activity and/or an affiliation between you and Goldman Sachs which does not exist and additionally creates confusion in the marketplace," John Squires of the New York-based law firm Chadbourne & Parke wrote Morgan on Goldman's behalf on 8 April 2009.

Squires gives Morgan until 18 April 2009 to confirm its intention to "cease and desist from using the mark of Goldman Sachs" or face possible legal action.

Volunteers

Goldman, which took $10 billion in bailout funds from the U.S. Treasury last October, couldn't be reached for comment.

Last September Goldman and Morgan Stanley got fast-track OKs from U.S. regulators to become bank holding companies to assuage fears they were all but out of cash.

Morgan, whose blog prominently features a notice disclaiming any affiliation with or approval by Goldman, responded to the threat of legal action this past Monday by filing suit against the investment bank in the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida. In effect, Morgan wants the court to tell Goldman to bug off -- mainly on the grounds that Goldman doesn't own goldmansachs666.com and that Morgan's use of that URL for a website that displays news and commentary on Goldman is fair and acceptable -- and pay Morgan's legal fees (and maybe a little something extra) in the process.

"That was mainly to keep [Goldman] from suing me in New York," says Morgan. "I was trying to save money -- though now it doesn't matter because I've got high-profile lawyers and law professors from all over the place clamoring to help out for free."

Response to Goldman's attempt to stop Morgan from including its name in a web address prompted Morgan to schedule a conference call for volunteers two days ago. That brought in dozens of people willing to dedicate anywhere from a few hours a week to 20 hours a week to the effort including a Swiss programmer who is working on a new design for the website, an Atlanta-based manager for the site's day-to-day operations, and "two guys to handle all the media requests we're getting -- in fact, this will probably be the last call I take; I just don't have the time," Morgan says.

Let's go

Morgan subsequently announced that Tom Borelli, a portfolio manager for the Free Enterprise Action Fund and a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Public Policy Research, has joined the "www.goldmansachs666.com" project as a spokesman.

That Goldman's lawyer made no mention of the Satanic "666" in the URL or to the content of the blog -- entries have titles like "Is Goldman Sachs Running the U.S. Government? I Say Yes," and "Was Goldman Sachs['] Huge Profit Due to AIG Bailout?" -- doesn't surprise Morgan, a real-estate consultant, a U.S. Coast Guard-licensed ship's captain and RIA owner who earned a law degree from Nova Southeastern. "That would have invited discovery, and that's the last thing they want around this."

Although Morgan's Goldman blog makes prominent note of the fact that he is short Goldman's stock, he says he plans to cover those positions as "they're not worth the trouble" of having to defend himself against charges of trying to bad mouth Goldman in order to make money.

No matter how his dispute with Goldman comes out, Morgan says he plans to launch a series of blogs related to goldmansachs666.com and dedicated to uncovering to what he views as a takeover of the U.S. government by Wall Street in a coordinated conspiracy based on graft, capital-market manipulation and direct infiltration of financial-firm moles into government agencies. Those sites have web addresses like jpmorgan666.com, pimco666.com, wellsfargo666.com, bankofamerica666.com, morganstanley666.com and citigroup666.com.

"I'm just a guy who likes to write," says Morgan. "It's what I do at three o'clock in the morning when I can't sleep, and it's my right to do it, and if they're coming after me for that then my reaction is 'screw you, let's go.'" -FWR

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