Cubs fan buys jetbluepark.com - much to Red Sox Nation's dismay

The business partners who created the new spring training home of the Boston Red Sox thought of just about everything when establishing JetBlue Park at Fenway South.

Someone along the way, however, neglected to do one thing: purchase the Internet domain name jetbluepark.com.

As of Tuesday afternoon, typing jetbluepark.com into a Web browser resulted in the New York Yankees homepage being unfurled onto the screen.

“It does?” said Sam Kennedy, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Boston Red Sox, when told Tuesday afternoon. Kennedy then watched as Red Sox senior adviser Charlie Steinberg typed jetbluepark.com onto his phone. “We’re going to have to look into that.”

Yankee fans and haters of Red Sox Nation have Fort Myers resident Eric Engelman to thank.

Last March 29, when Lee County and the Red Sox announced JetBlue Airways Corp. would purchase the naming rights for the new complex, Engelman saw the story while watching the eveningnews.

The next day, Engelman said he opened his wife’s godaddy.com account and saw that jetbluepark.com, the domain name, was for sale.

Engelman bought it. He said he paid $8.

“I just thought it would be fun to have,” Engelman said.

Kennedy smiled when informed of Engelman’s actions.

“Have him call me,” Kennedy said. “We can make a deal. Or maybe we can make a deal.”

Engelman, 30, works for Lennar Homes as a customer service representative. His wife, Lauren, works at Chico’s clothing as an associate online marketing manager. The domainname is registered in his wife’s name.

“She had nothing to do with it,” Eric Engelman said. “I just used her account.”

A couple of months after he bought it, Eric Engelman said he could not remember exactly when, he thought it would be funny to link his website to the Yankees home page.

Engelman, who grew up in Ohio and roots for the Cubs, said he has no feelings of animosity for the Red Sox or love for the Yankees. He just thought doing what he did would be funny.

“If the Red Sox or JetBlue had wanted that domain name, they could have bought it,” Engelman said. He said someone living in Naples bought the jetbluepark.net domain name, which routes users to a real estate website. Engelman said he never planned to approach the Red Sox or JetBlue or Lee County to resell the domain name. He owns only one other domain name: ericengelman.com, on which a photo of him at Wrigley Field can be seen and in which he tells the story of buying jetbluepark.com.

“My reaction is that jetbluepark.com should go to redsox.com, not yankees.com,” Kennedy said.

Because Engelman is not profiting from jetbluepark.com, Fort Myers attorney Bill Noonan said this would make for an interesting case should the MLB Advanced Media, the Red Sox, JetBlue or Lee County pursue it.

In 1999, Congress passed the Federal Lanham Act, which was designed to prevent “cybersquatting” on Internet domain names.

“The law was designed to give trademark owners strong rights under federal law to those who were squatting on similar domain names for other purposes,” said Noonan, who specializes in intellectual property and trademark infringement cases. “Are they doing something not for a legitimate purpose but to extort a company?

“Now this is an interesting case, because there was no JetBlue Park at the time he bought the domain name. I’m not sure how this would be litigated. This isn’t in bad taste.

“It has a certain degree of playfulness and humor and satire, that kind of a thing.”

Pursuing any trademark infringement would further be complicated, Noonan said, in that four businesses are involved. Lee County owns the land on which the ballpark sits. The Boston Red Sox are leasing that land for 30 years. JetBlue bought naming rights to the stadium, and MLB Advanced Media operates all of MLB’s online endeavors.

Said Noonan: “It would take several hours to really search and research this.”

Hilarious.

Amusing yes, but if the Red Sox really wanted the site they'd get it without paying him a dollar. Cybersquatting became illegal a long time ago.