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Reached for comment on June 14, Liffland told the Chronicle that the matter is in the hands of the attorneys, and that he cannot comment on it at this time.
Cunningham did speak with the Chronicle on June 10, and said that in his view, the village does not need to involve attorneys in order to resolve this matter.
"I am not trying to represent myself as the Village of Pawling or as the Town of Pawling," he said. "It is meant to be a community information dissemination center. The concept is a community information portal.
"I am always willing to sit down and talk to someone about it, and I don't feel that that has been their attitude.
I don't like it when the first thing they do is send a lawyer. All they have to do is sit down and talk to me.
"I am not going to drag the village taxpayers' money into a hole. I think they are being childish. If they want a Village of Pawling Web site, they have every right to do one. I would even volunteer my time to help them do it for free, rather than waste the village taxpayers' money.
"They basically told me, in their documentation and paperwork, that they are going to bring up the concept of cybersquatting. Cybersquatting is when you deliberately grab a domain name with the intent of extorting money from the people who may be linked in some way to the name.
"The issuance or use of a trademark and a name, even a valid trademark of a name, does not necessarily constitute cybersquatting. It has to do with your intent. You must prove bad intent.
"My view of this whole thing is that they were going to have someone design the village Web page. They wanted a new one. There are lots of people who would volunteer to do it for free."
According to searchWebServices.com: "According the U.S. federal law known as the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, cybersquatting is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else."
According to Kronenberg and Associates on their Web site: "If you feel that someone has registered a domain (containing, say, your business or product name) and is competing against you unfairly, you may be able to assert your 'common law trademark rights', even though you have not registered a trademark with the federal government."
The site
Cunningham has ownership of three domains:
www.pawlingnewyork.com, www.villageofpawling.com and www.villageofpawling.org
The first is the Web site. The other two he refers to as links to the first. That is to say, the content is at the first site. There is no content at the other two, but if someone dials into any of the three, they will arrive at www.pawlingnewyork.com.
He said he has over 1,000 hours devoted to the construction of www.pawlingnewyork.com.
On arrival at the site, the viewer is greeted by an animation, a woman who gives this welcome:
"Welcome to the Pawling Community Communicator. We offer free E-mail, chat, and instant messaging, along with local news and events. Soon we will be starting a village radio station that will stream local news and music through the Internet.
"We will be working full time on this site all summer, so look forward to more interesting concepts. Thank you and have a great day."
As Cunningham explained, "It is meant to be an informational service. For instance, if you have a group or an organization in the community, you can place your information on my Web site. We can also e-mail everybody who is signed up on the Web site. We want as many people as possible to sign up on the site, to get involved in it, so that we can have mass exchanges of information among them.
"It will have all of the information, the schools, the history, the local government and all, plus all the new technology of sharing and exchanging information among members of the community.
"We can hold discussions on issues in the community on the site. There will be rooms on the Web site, chat rooms, where people can go in and talk and discuss issues.
"We will have cameras all around the community. We have four cameras now that are set around the community, including one up on Quaker Hill, and one in the middle of the village.
"The idea is that everything today is keyed on information. The idea is to take information, and disseminate it outward as rapidly as possible. That is the concept of the Web site."
