A five-year legal battle by the organisers of The Oscars over alleged cybersquatting has ended in defeat.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences accused domain registrar GoDaddy of illegally profiting from its trademarks by selling domain names including academyawards.net and oscarsredcarpet.com.
It demanded $100,000 (£64,000) per infringement, equal to more than $29m (£18m).
But GoDaddy resisted repeated attempts by the Academy to settle the case, and eventually won after a four-day trial.
The Academy had claimed GoDaddy profited from the sites - thanks to Google-powered adverts which appear on parked domain names.
However GoDaddy pointed out that the income from the adverts amounted to mere hundreds of dollars.
The judge also found there was "no evidence of injury" to the Academy, saying it had not lost any profits and not seen any traffic diverted.
In court, GoDaddy's lawyer Robert Galvin asked why the Academy had gone after GoDaddy rather than Google which ran the ads on the sites.
"Why are you going after GoDaddy?" he asked. "Is it because we have kind of a funny name, and we're not the world's largest search provider?"
A 129-page judgement comprehensively pulled apart the case against GoDaddy.
The judge pointed out that some of the Oscar-themed domains were legitimately owned and operated by people called Oscar.
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