Cybersquatting or innocent Domain Investment?
Posted by Adriana Tayraco on Mon, Aug 08, 2011
The World Wide Web has turned 20, leaving behind those early years full of MIDI music and cheesy 90’s animated gifts. With the invention of the Internet, our life was immensely simplified with the use of Search Engines (and later on, Social Media), the creation of ‘click-and-mortar’ businesses and the re-writing of most of our business textbooks after the dot-com boom (and crash) of the early 2000’s.
Ever since the Internet was at its infancy, there have been cybersquatters luring after trademark and celebrity names. What started as an easy way to attract an audience, cybersquatting has now gained notoriety after several lawsuits made it illegal for anyone to register a domain solely with the intent to profit from another company that desires it.
There was a time when cybersquatters were registering typos (known as typosquatting) or similar spellings of a website and then expected to sell it to the trademark owner for an outrageous amount of money. Celebrities and businesses alike have had to hire specialized companies to fight for them and secure the rights to their domain names. Domain Investing, on the other hand, consists of registering generic or geographically based names while staying away from trademark infringement. These domains will later be valued according to their individual merit and worth to the company/individual requiring it.
Given the nature of both practices, it is easy to confuse and swap them for what they are not. The legislation governing domain name registration have been written and approved almost at par with the development of the industry, which has made honest domain investing much more complicated.
Take the Mike Rowe vs. Microsoft case as an example – Mike was a Canadian teenager who set up his web design business and registered it under MikeRoweSoft.com. Microsoft took legal action against it based on the phonetic similarities between the two names. The fight that ensued resulted in bad publicity for Microsoft – who was accused of being too aggressive against a grade 12 student – and forced them to come to an out of court agreement. Mike had to give up his domain.
In order to file suit and hopefully win back the ownership of your domain name, you would have to prove that the cybersquatter had bought and planned to use the domain in bad faith. Because of such broad and complex definition of cybersquatting, legitimate domain name investors (or just regular folks who want to start a website) have been tied up in legal cybersquatting limbo and such a battle can be very difficult and expensive to win.
Thus, as with any other threat in life, the best approach is to prevent it. If you know you want to create a site then it is best to purchase your domain (and all other domains associated with it) a.s.a.p. In addition, you want to monitor your domain name regularly to make sure you can catch a cybersquatter before he/she can damage your image any further.