A gay New Yorker, Christopher Lamparello, 36, won a big Supreme Court victory in his Internet battle against Rev. Jerry Falwell, a fundamentalist Baptist pastor and the founder of the Moral Majority movement.

Lamparello runs a site fallwell.com, which takes potshots at Fallwell's views on homosexuality. "Rev. Falwell is completely wrong about people who are gay or lesbian," Lamparello's site says - under a red disclaimer that offers a link to Falwell's site www.falwell.com .

Very often, surfers who were looking for the reverend's online ministry went to fallwell.com by mistake. Lamparello won the right to keep the fallwell.com site.

Falwell is of the opinion that homosexuality is a sin that gays and lesbians must repent of. The Supreme Court said it would not hear his appeal of a lower-court ruling that went against him.

Last year, the appeals court ruled that Lamparello was not violating Falwell's trademark since he was not running the Web site to make a profit. Lamparello's lawyer, Paul Levy, maintained that Lamparello has the free-speech right to run the crib site.

"A domain name is not just the source of a Web site, but the substance of a Web site," said Levy, whose group Public Citizen took the case gratis. "You can say the name of the person you're criticizing, and you can put their name in the domain name of your Web site."

Falwell's lawyer had argued that it was a case of trademark infringement. Many supporters of Falwell who went to the site by mistake were disturbed by the content.