IN LESS antagonistic times, a private settlement without undergoing litigation could have been reached in this landmark domain-name dispute between PLDT and Kaimo. But as observers point out, there is no love lost between the disputants for them to ever come to such a conclusion.

Kaimo and PLDTI represent the staunch opposition to PLDT’s long derailed plan for a local measured service or phone metering. Since 1997, the consumer group has actively engaged PLDT in public hearings on this scheme.

Not surprisingly, PLDT never bothered to negotiate with Kaimo—at the very least even write to him—about the disputed domain name. No domain name speculator, Kaimo says he has no intention of making a profit from selling pldt.com to PLDT.

So far, the defendants seem to have the upperhand in the case. During the first hearing, PLDT withdrew its application for a temporary restraining order (TRO) against Kaimo and PLDTI, an act that observers say strips the PLDT charge of all its pretense of urgency.

PLDT had pleaded for the court to grant its TRO and injunction application to stop defendants from using “PLDT” as domain name of the pldt.com site and in its buried codes and meta tags. The company claims such codes have led clients more to the pldt.com Web site, whose contents—articles, features, illustrations—are “derogatory and tend to discredit (it).”

Kaimo does not deny the fact that www.pldt.com does contain material unpalatable to PLDT. “I set up the site in December 1998 for the purpose of providing a vehicle to intensify public awareness on PLDT’s proposal for a mandatory local metering scheme,” he says. With the scheme temporarily suspended for further public hearings and studies, www.pldt.com has since evolved into a parody site, serving as a forum for expressing and ventilating consumer gripes and dissatisfaction with PLDT’s inefficient service, and venue for personal commentary and political satire on other burning issues. Recent lampoon objects of pldt.com were the Marcoses’s ill-gotten wealth, Imelda’s Ulirang Ina award, the Cherry Hills tragedy and militia atrocities in East Timor.

What Kaimo denies is PLDT’s allegations of unfair competition and tradename dilution in a deliberate attempt to confuse or deceive customers. He notes that he is not selling telephones or even profiting from the site. To distinguish it from the PLDT Web site, the non-commercial pldt.com site even carries this disclaimer: “100% Pure Pinoy—Unadulterated angst, pain, horror, tears, rumors, laughter and lies for the whole family or your money back.”

As a parody site, pldt.com may find relief in a study on domain name-trademark interaction by Prof. Milton Mueller of the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. The study involved 121 cases of conflict between domain name registrants and trademark owners. Mueller says domain names for acts of parody, preemption or expression are not classified as infringement “unless the domain name user pretended to be the organization that is being criticized, spoofed or preempted.”

Most cases of parody and expression, Mueller adds, are “noncommercial uses and therefore would not be liable to infringement claims under traditional laws.”

To PLDT though, www.pldt.com is anything but a free speech site, and its suit a suppression of the Constitutionally guaranteed right. “This has nothing to do with freedom of speech,” Antonio Samson, PLDT executive vice chairman, says. “It is an unlawful appropriation and use of the PLDT tradename and a legitimate defense of a 71-year old company’s good name.”

But Kaimo and PLDTI are not about to fold so easily. Buoyed by the TRO plea withdrawal, they have fought back, filing separate countersuits against PLDT. Claiming injury for PLDT’s “baseless, unfounded and unwarranted” action, PLDTI has filed a counterclaim amounting to P101 million in moral and exemplary damages and attorney’s fees for dragging the group in its trademark infringement case.

A founding member of PLDTI, Kaimo has himself owned up to the acquisition and payment of the domain name registration, as well as the creation and maintenance of the pldt.com Web site.

But he has preferred to file a “Y2K” (Year 2000) countersuit to put PLDT to task for its suit against him. Explaining his lawsuit against PLDT, Kaimo says he “expects (PLDT) to be Y2K-compliant because I’m countersuing them for P2,000 in exemplary and corrective damages.” This, he adds, should teach the company a lesson—that is, “to think twice before filing nuisance suits of this sort against ordinary citizens.”