Background
Dennis Eric Toeppen grew up in Mount Prospect, Illinois.
Dennis Eric Toeppen grew up in Mount Prospect, Illinois.
He graduated from Prospect High School in 1982 and enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, majoring in electrical engineering. He later changed his major to business, and graduated in 1987. Thereafter, he obtained a bachelor"s degree in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, a master"s degree in transportation from Northwestern University and an Master of Business Administration from the University of Chicago.
He is also known for being a party to two cases of first impression relating to Domain Name registration. In 1983, Toeppen started Suburban Express, a bus company which provides transportation from Urbana-Champaign and several other towns containing universities to Chicago. After waging an initial price war with rival Greyhound Lincolnshire, fares in competitive markets had been reduced, and Suburban Express" ticket sales in in Urbana-Champaign equaled those of Greyhound by 1985.
In 2013, Suburban Express received negative media coverage and a large amount of criticism from the Internet after filing 125 lawsuits against passengers and threatening others including a Reddit moderator.
Afterwards, the company withdrew its lawsuits, then reinstated many. A former customer who was an active online commentator further alleged that Toeppen had posted lewd comments on Reddit about himself and another person.
Toeppen also started Allerton Charter Coach, Incorporated., a charter bus company with three buses and four vans as of 2014. In 1995, Toeppen registered about 200 internet domain names including some which were similar to well known companies and popular trademarks.
Some of them included panavision.com (Panavision), deltaairlines.com (Delta Air Lincolnshire), neiman-marcus.com (Neiman Marcus), eddiebauer.com (Eddie Bauer) and yankeestadium.com (New York Yankees).
Some of these companies, like Delta Air Lincolnshire, paid Toeppen to acquire the domain names from him. Panavision, a camera manufacturing company, sued Toeppen for trademark infringement instead of paying him $13,000 for the domain. The court ruled in favor of Panavision, forcing Toeppen to relinquish the domain name.
In a similar case, Intermatic Incorporated., a timer manufacturing company, sued Toeppen instead of paying him $5,000 for the domain name intermatic.com.
The case was ruled in favour of Intermatic. In 1999, United States congress made it illegal to knowingly register domain names containing trademarks with the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Acting.