The suspended part is caused by the site using more bandwidth than they paid the webhost for (I noticed it before it’s back up now). Most likely because of a surge of traffic and it being the end of the month, right before the bw resets.

The site now has a disclaimer when you go to it stating that it is not affiliated that you have to agree to before continuing. You can see it at: http://minus.com/lzipO8zWCv59f

Just some updates for you

In general, sure, no question. However, there are some problems with this argument. First and foremost, it does not appear that you can buy an airplane ticket from the site. That means he is effectively not in competition with them. The trade dress argument is much weaker than, e.g., you dress up your burger bar to have red background and yellow arches.

The other problem is that you often do lift a fair amount of what you are criticising in order to make it clear who your target is. There, I suppose we look at Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, 510 US 569, and the case is somewhat weakened. Yeah, that’s copyright, but they’re going to have the devil’s own time with a Lanham act claim due the the first problem.

Untied appears to use exactly one rounded graphic design element. United’s site uses far more, and the one similar element doesn’t come close to extending across the page width on Untied as it does on United’s site.

I was going to examine the page code to see if there were less-obvious similarities, but Untied’s hosting provider has either caved in advance or perhaps received a court order—I assume the former.

In the event the site finds a provider with a spine and returns unchanged the similarity of the two appears limited to five to seven DIV elements, depending how you count, in similar places, with similar colours.

I’m far from an expert on trade dress, but if using similarly-coloured boxes in similar places is in want of an injunction, quite a lot of people are in trouble.

None of that will negatively impact the message that the speaker wants to deliver. And, frankly, I don’t see how trying to make the site look like United’s site adds anything to his message.

It seems to me that United’s position here is “say whatever you want, but don’t say it wearing a United Airlines mask.” I don’t have a problem with that.

My instincts are to protect the little guy. But, here, it seems that the little guy is being a bit of a dickwad over issues that really don’t seem to matter.