Copyright of Name

I've been admin of our forum for the past 6 months. Recently more than 40% of the site and 50% of the staff voted on temporarily removing the admin position of another administrator. A friend of that administrator is now claiming they own the copyright to the name of the site (registering it with the government) and will send a legal and/or formal complaint to Forumsmotion demanding our site be given to him or taken down. This particular friend and member joined upwards of 8 months after the site was made and does own a blank "xxx.com" address (in which xxx is the name of our forum). But given the lack of prior art and refusal to display documentation I simply can't just give into this threat. But I'd like it to be shown somewhere publically that Forumsmotion will side with the founding admin and current administration of a forum and/or will contact the administration before shutting it down (hopefully with some way to change our forum's name, which we are more than willing to do).

I am clearly no lawyer but I say, change the site name and he'll lose the copyright ownership. Then it'll just belong to you and whoever else was in charge of creating the forum.

We want to change our forum's name to avoid the DMCA. Unfortunately our founding admin is gone. Getting a new founding admin is almost out of the question as the mods and admins won't agree on who it should be. There has been thought of just demodding people and getting it that way but our community is suffering right now and this one member is doing this just to get back at us.

Sadly staff can't decide on who. There is a bit of a war about it.

That being said: He doesn't own the copyright on our site. The site was made ages before he even bought the domain name. But he thinks because he bought a domain name from GoDaddy that he can file a DMCA and get our forum deleted.

He's actually threatening us with "If you don't give my friend admin position on your site, I'm getting your forum deleted with a DMCA notice". And its causing other admins to panic over it...how much investigation is done if a notice is given? If buying a $25 copyright over a name and a domain name is enough to get a forum shut down, what protects us if we were to move to another forum to avoid this? Mind you the claim is ludacrious--he hasn't informed anyone on the site of the claim and is claiming all our posts is his because he submitted a claim. Its an obvious total troll but one that is causing some chaos between our members who think you guys close down sites like youtube closes down videos (shoot first; ask questions only if litigated).