The Address on the Air: How MTV and Adam Curry Fought Over mtv.com

The message carries a time stamp of 3:44 a.m. on May 10, 1994. Its subject line read "MTV SUES CURRY." Adam Curry had resigned from his job as an MTV video jockey the month before. He wrote that he had planned to keep the matter quiet, but journalists had already heard, and he wanted his side of the story known. He signed the message adam@mtv.com. The address in his signature was the address in dispute.

The usual retelling is short. MTV ignored the internet, one of its hosts took the name, and everything changed when he quit. The documents give a more exact account. MTV formally objected in January 1994, three months before Curry left. No court decided who owned mtv.com. The settlement terms stayed private, and the $100,000 price that later lists repeat has no firm source in the case itself.

Curry registered mtv.com in June 1993

In June 1993, Wired later reported, Curry registered the name with the InterNIC. His explanation fit in one line: it was a cool address to have, and it was available. He called it a "vanity plate."

Nothing in the registration system stood in his way. A federal judge later described the InterNIC's practice by quoting the journalist Joshua Quittner. The InterNIC handed out names for free under a simple rule: "First come, first served. Trademark violations are the requestor's responsibility."

Curry connected his own computer to the internet and ran a gopher site. It offered a daily "Cybersleaze Report" and "Adam Curry's Brain Waves." According to Wired, he paid for the site himself and considered it a hobby.

The address soon traveled further than the hobby. On October 7, 1993, a message on David Farber's Interesting People mailing list announced that MTV was "now an official Internet site" and pasted in a file signed by Curry that began "Welcome to mtv.com!" Ten days later, Marc Andreessen forwarded a note from Curry to the WWW-Talk mailing list, and Curry was more careful. He wrote that mtv.com was "NOT sponsored by MTV Networks," that the network was aware of his work and gave its blessing, and that he paid for the T1 connection himself. Even so, the NCSA "What's New" page wrote on October 30 that "Adam Curry of MTV is running a Web server on mtv.com."

Read together, those notices show the problem that would reach court. One person ran the machine. A reader saw a television network's name.

Most of the 1993 record comes from Curry

The fullest account of that year sits in a federal opinion, and its first caution is in the opening line of its facts: "The facts alleged in Curry's Answer and Counterclaims are as follows." On a motion to dismiss, a court accepts well-pleaded allegations as true. These are Curry's claims. They are not findings.

Curry alleged that in about June 1993 he met with MTV Networks vice president Matthew Farber. He said Farber disclaimed any interest in a joint venture but indicated that Curry could keep developing the site at his own expense. Curry alleged that during an August taping, senior executive Joel Stillerman "made clear that MTVN had no objection" to his use of the address. He also alleged that from August 1993 to mid-January 1994, MTV programmers placed the letters "mtv.com" on screen for viewers of "Top Twenty Countdown."

Curry's May 1994 message adds details. He wrote that popquiz@mtv.com was used for trivia questions on "Most Wanted," a program he hosted, that viewers could send valentine dedications to elove@mtv.com, and that he never charged MTV Networks for the service. He also made a claim about the audience: an average of 35,000 accesses a day from Mosaic clients alone. His pleadings said millions of internet users had reached the address by spring 1994. No independent traffic record appears in these sources.

The same message holds the line that made the story famous. Curry wrote that executives "stated 'MTV has no interest in the internet'" and gave him their blessing anyway. Thirty years later, he told it again on his No Agenda podcast. The show's automatically generated transcript has him recalling this version: "We've got the AOL keyword. We're not interested in the internet." Both versions are his recollection. The sources for this article contain no MTV document or statement that confirms those words.

MTV objected before Curry left

The date of MTV's first formal step changes the story. On January 19, 1994, MTV Networks formally requested that Curry stop using the address. Curry still worked at the network.

Curry's May message describes a cease-and-desist demand, gives no date for it, and points to publicity. He wrote that press coverage grew, that people "started to wake up at 1515 Broadway," and that MTV's attorneys raised possible "confusion" among internet users. He said he asked to settle amicably and that the situation cooled down for a couple of months.

Curry's pleadings describe mixed signals during those months. He alleged that on-air references continued and that Stillerman asked him in February to post certain materials on the site. He also alleged that MTV Networks and Viacom had spent the second half of 1993 exploring online services, and that the work led to an America Online agreement. In his telling, MTV had used his site to "test the waters."

Curry resigned in April. He wrote that he resigned on air and that MTV chose not to air it. MTV Networks filed suit on May 5, 1994, according to a trade report that month, claiming trademark infringement, deceptive trade practices and unfair competition. The court's later opinion adds breach of Curry's employment contracts to MTV's grounds.

Curry's message drew his line at the name itself. He said he would remove references to MTV from the site, but he would keep the address: "I registered the domain name, and I don't plan on giving it up." He argued that letters in an address could not infringe intellectual property, and he said an InterNIC search showed at least 15 domain names with mtv in them.

Curry called the case the Roe v. Wade of the internet

The phrase has a traceable source. Quittner quoted it in "Billions Registered," his October 1994 Wired article on the early rush for domain names. "I will fight this all the way," Curry said, and the case would be the "Roe v. Wade of the internet and the information superhighway." He went on: "There is just no way that MTV has the right to my address. It's my address. Mine." A 1997 law journal article attributes the same phrase to a Cleveland Plain Dealer report of May 25, 1994, so Curry likely used it within weeks of the suit. This article did not read the newspaper report itself.

The Wired piece also set out the two theories of the case. MTV's lawyer said the case would be fought on traditional trademark grounds. Curry's lawyer, Joe Donley, turned the argument around and warned of "reverse confusion." He said millions of users had come to associate the address "not with MTV, but with Adam."

By then Curry had agreed not to use the name "in a confusing manner" while the case continued, and he was maintaining a site at metaverse.com. When Quittner asked whether Curry would sell the name to MTV, Donley replied: "There are things going on that I cannot comment upon."

The judge ruled on the counterclaims and left the address undecided

Judge McKenna's October 28, 1994 decision in MTV Networks v. Curry, in the federal court in Manhattan, is the only substantive court ruling this article found. It answered a narrow question. MTV asked the court to dismiss Curry's counterclaims. The contract counterclaim and the counterclaim for fraud and negligent misrepresentation survived, and Curry received 30 days to replead his unfair competition claim with more detail.

That result allowed the counterclaims to continue. It did not decide that Curry owned mtv.com, and it did not resolve MTV's trademark claims.

The opinion is most useful for how a judge read the address in 1994. MTV argued that Curry's alleged agreement involved a "major property right" that would normally be in writing, and that his earlier written contracts denied him rights to MTV's intellectual property. The court answered carefully, in the conditional. MTV "may simply have failed to appreciate the commercial potential of an Internet music site," it wrote, and the property-right description "may derive from the 20-20 vision of hindsight."

A footnote went further. It compared domain names to telephone mnemonics but said they were of greater importance, because the internet had no satisfactory equivalent to a phone directory. Then it added one sentence: "A domain name mirroring a corporate name may be a valuable corporate asset, as it facilitates communication with a customer base."

The settlement produced no public price

The case never reached final judgment. The 1997 law journal article says the parties settled in March 1995, with Curry giving up the name on undisclosed terms. That is the most specific date this article found, but it rests on one secondary source, and the same passage places the lawsuit in October 1994, the month of the opinion, when the earlier records show May. Other accounts disagree: one reference site says the suit was settled later in 1994, and another page says the case settled two years later. The opinion of October 28, 1994 shows that the case was still active then. Curry's own later statement was brief. In an interview with the online magazine verbosity, he offered an "Official Response": "The lawsuit between Mr. Curry and MTV Networks has been settled, neither party has any further comment."

One public record adds a small puzzle. The .com registry's entry for mtv.com gives a registration date of February 14, 1995, about 20 months after Curry's June 1993 registration. The record does not explain the gap, and this article does not guess at it.

The money is harder. In 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that neither MTV, nor Curry, nor his former manager could discuss the terms. Retellings call the amount undisclosed. Sedo, a domain marketplace, says the name was sold to MTV for an undisclosed sum. Yet a 2012 post on the blog TLD Investors observed that mtv.com is always listed on domain sales lists at $100,000, and the post traced that number to a different dispute.

In 2002, Viacom filed a complaint over mtv.com.sg against a Taiwanese company, Elitist Technologies. Viacom's lawyer pointed to Elitist's willingness to sell the name for US$200,000 as evidence of bad faith. A law firm note on the case reports Elitist's defense: the price was not exorbitant since Viacom "had earlier bought the domain name 'mtv.com' for US$100,000." Viacom lost that case in an April 15, 2002 decision, when the panel found "MTV" descriptive and generic as used in that name. The $100,000 figure therefore appears here as one party's argument in another case, in another country, about seven years after the reported settlement. This article could not locate the Singapore decision itself, and it found no statement from Curry or MTV that confirms the number. The price remains unverified.

Later rules arrived after this case had ended

When Curry and MTV settled, the tools that now handle such fights did not exist. ICANN adopted the UDRP in 1999, and Congress enacted the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act the same year. The case ended before either one existed, so any outcome under those rules stays hypothetical.

The dispute itself grew from two kinds of paper and one missing kind. Curry had a registration. MTV had trademarks and written employment contracts. Curry's contract counterclaim rested on conversations from 1993, and the opinion spent much of its length on that gap. A company that finds a staff member holding its name, and a staff member who builds on a company's name, both depend on memory until someone writes the arrangement down.

Quittner put the commercial question to his readers while the case was still open: "What could you sell mtv.com for?" He wrote that no one knew the answer. For this one transaction, more than 30 years later, the public record still does not say.

Sources and further reading

• MTV Networks v. Curry, 867 F. Supp. 202 (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 28, 1994), No. 94 Civ. 3271 (LMM): full text, David Loundy archive. All case facts in that opinion are Curry's allegations unless the court says otherwise. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• Adam Curry, "MTV SUES CURRY," message dated May 10, 1994: text as reposted on DV Info Net, from the 'Lectric Law Library copy, which shows the same date line. The repost says "purely because it was a cool address." Wired quotes "partly because." This article quotes only the words common to both. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• Joshua Quittner, "Billions Registered," Wired, October 1994. Primary source for the "Roe v. Wade" quotation. Wired's web text prints "internet" in lowercase, and the 1997 law journal article prints "Internet." Fetched 2026-11-03.
• Gayle Weiswasser, "Domain Names, the Internet, and Trademarks: Infringement in Cyberspace," 13 Santa Clara High Tech. L.J. 137, 149-50 (1997). Source for the March 1995 settlement date. Supporting passage on p. 149: "The two parties settled the dispute in March 1995." Fetched 2026-11-03.
• Telecompaper, "MTV Files Suit About VJ's Internet Address," May 24, 1994. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• Interesting People mailing list, "MTV on the net (in case you hadn't noticed...)," October 7, 1993. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• Marc Andreessen, forwarding Adam Curry, "mtv.com," WWW-Talk, October 17, 1993. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• NCSA, "What's New, October 1993," MIT mirror. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• No Agenda, episode 1694 transcript, September 12, 2024. Automatically generated, so the wording is approximate. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• verbosity, "verbosity interviews Adam Curry," issue 4, undated. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• Verisign RDAP, mtv.com registry record. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• Reyhan Harmanci, "How an ex-VJ transformed conventional media into the vox populi. Ever hear of podcasting?" San Francisco Chronicle, May 17, 2006. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• Ella Cheong Spruson & Ferguson, "Viacom Loses Fight For 'MTV' Domain Name," June 11, 2002. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• Politech, press reports on the mtv.com.sg ruling, April 26, 2002. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• TLD Investors, "Take a trip back in time to some domain stories you might not have known about," October 13, 2012. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• NNDB, Adam Curry. ibiblio, "All About Internet Domain Names." Both are secondary, and the article cites them only to show that settlement dates differ. Fetched 2026-11-03.
• Gizmodo, "5 Domain Name Battles of the Early Web." Sedo, "5 companies who had to fight for their own domain names." Fetched 2026-11-03.