Sunday, September 23, 2007

This is why cybersquatters are still in business

According to today's Sunday Business Post, the Berkeley Court, Jury’s Hotel and Jury’s Towers in Ballsbridge are to be reopened under the D4hotels.com brand.

D4hotels.com was registered on Wednesday, but all the other extensions (.ie, .net, etc.) are still free, as are D4hotel.com, .net, etc. Although I'd be more than happy to act for the owners to try to evict the inevitable cybersquatters and typosquatters, it would be substantially cheaper simply to register the other extensions and variants in the first place.

Update: Well, that was quick. D4hotels.net and D4hotels.org were anonymously registered one day later at GoDaddy.com. D4hotel.com was registered on the same day also.

2 comments:

  1. I'm curious as to how you would manage to evict someone from d4hotels.net?

    It's rather generic, and I wonder have they trademarked d4hotels brand yet?

    Genuinely curious
    Rgds
    Richard

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  2. That's a fair question and you've hit on a potential issue for a business in this situation.

    The absence of a registered trademark isn't necessarily fatal to a UDRP claim - most panelists seem to be sympathetic to claims based on unregistered marks (or common law marks as they're called in the US) - see the Berkman Centre UDRP Opinion Guide:
    http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/udrp/opinion/ttext.html#2.1.2

    Similarly a passing off claim could be brought in the Irish courts even in the absence of a registered mark.

    The difficulty, however, for those types of claim is that they depend on the claimant showing that they have built up a reputation in the mark. This could obviously be a problem for a claimant who hasn't yet commenced business - which is another reason to ensure you secure the other domains.

    Also, as you point out, the name is rather generic, which wouldn't help any UDRP or passing off claim. All the more reason to secure the surrounding domains before going public.

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