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WEST PALM BEACH, FL – If you type Nissan.com today, December 2025, you still won’t end up on Nissan Motor’s website. After 25+ years of lawsuits, filings, injunctions, offers, counters, bad press, and global brand confusion, the automaker continues to operate from NissanUSA.com while Nissan.com remains in the hands of the estate of one man: Uzi Nissan.
And remarkably, the story is still evolving. Even after Uzi passed away in 2020, even after hackers tried to steal the domain out of the family’s registrar account, even after a 2024 federal court order was needed just to get it back, the domain is still where it has always been: with the Nissan family, not the car company.
What you see on Nissan.com now isn’t a commercial website at all. It’s a memorial page, part tribute and part reminder of a legal battle that started in the mid-90s when Uzi registered the domain simply because it was his last name and he was running a computer business.
The interesting part, and something that still frustrates trademark attorneys today, is that nothing about this case resembles cybersquatting. Uzi registered Nissan.com in 1994, long before Nissan Motor cared about their .com identity. When the automaker finally came knocking in 1999, they came with an offer Uzi found insulting, followed immediately by a lawsuit demanding $10 million and control of the domain.
That fight dragged on for nearly eight years. Uzi won the central argument: he wasn’t squatting, he wasn’t infringing, and yes, he could keep the name. The courts did restrict certain things he could do, such as running automotive ads, but the domain itself stayed with him. Nissan Motor had to accept that their official U.S. home would forever be NissanUSA.com, a compromise almost no major corporation wants to admit was forced upon them.
Then came the unexpected twist: Uzi’s death in 2020 and the domain theft that followed. Hackers managed to transfer Nissan.com and Nissan.net away from the family, prompting speculation that the automaker had finally acquired it. But that wasn’t the case. In 2024, a federal judge ordered the domains transferred back to the estate after determining they had been stolen.
So here we are, all these years later. The site is still not owned by Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.. The family still controls it. The automaker is still operating around the loss. And the domain, once the center of one of the most famous internet-era legal battles, now functions as a memorial to the man who refused to sell his name.
Whether the family ever plans to sell is unknown. Whether Nissan Motor would even try again after spending millions fighting this is another question entirely. But as of right now, Nissan.com remains one of the rare examples of a global brand permanently losing a domain battle it once believed it was entitled to win.
About The Author: John Colascione is Chief Executive Officer of SEARCHEN NETWORKS®. He specializes in Website Monetization, is a Google AdWords Certified Professional, authored a how-to book called ”Mastering Your Website‘, and is a key player in several online businesses.
That’s a story for a film script, John (and you should be the author!). Thanks for sharing it.