LEWISTON – A Lewiston-Auburn group held firm when a big city arts organization “from away” came calling, wanting the Internet address the Maine nonprofit has been using for several years.

Laura Zucker, executive director of the Los Angeles County Arts Council, was looking for a new Internet address for her organization. She thought the current Internet address, www.lacountyarts.org, was too long. But a shorter, snappier one – like www.laarts.org – would do the trick.

Before trying to register the new name, she typed the address into her browser.

“To much of my amazement,” she recalled, “I ended up in Maine.”

The site and the domain name belong to L/A Arts, a nonprofit arts agency based in Lewiston. L/A Arts has had the site since the mid-1990s.

Worried that “poor, misdirected souls” looking for her site would end up browsing events in the Lewiston-Auburn area, Zucker called Richard Willing, executive director of L/A Arts, and introduced herself.

“Then there was a long pause,” Willing recalled. “And she said, ‘I guess you know what I’m calling about.”‘

But Willing didn’t know, not even when she told him it had to do with his organization’s Web site.

“She said, ‘You have our address. When somebody looks for us, they get this place in Maine that they never heard of. You need to give us that address,”‘ Willing said.

He didn’t budge, not even when Zucker offered to pay for the coveted URL.

But, in this case, it turns out that could be a way you could get there from here – via a link on the L/A Arts site to that of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

“My preference is to have the domain name, but the link is better than a fork in the eye,” Zucker quipped. “We’re in the same business of promoting the arts. I’m certainly not going to do anything hostile.”

Even if Zucker wanted to mount a hostile takeover of the L/A Arts domain name, her chances of success don’t seem promising.

Anthony Perkins, a Portland lawyer who specializes in Internet matters, said a company is entitled to a domain name only if it is associated with a trademarked name or logo. While the domain name www.coke.com might be considered trademark infringement against Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc., names for most nonprofit agencies are handed out on a first-come, first-served basis, he said.