Domain Management

Google & eBay, Keywords & Domains, & ICANN

Sell a trademark as a keyword for directed search or online auctions and make $billions. But use a trademark in a domain name for direct search and lose the domain, or worse. The gap between how trademark law treats the two species of search has grown wider in the wake of several landmark 2010 trademark law decisions -- and provides another sound reason why ICANN should not establish any new rights protections for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) beyond those STI-RT compromise positions already included in the fourth version of its Draft Applicant Guidebook (DAGv4). more

Trademark Owners Should Consider .mp Domain Name Registration

Saipan DataCom, Inc.’s upcoming late March 2009 open launch of chi.mp (“Content Hub & Identity Management Platform) has implications for trademark holders that seem to have gone unnoticed to date. Chi.mp is a free platform that enables social network users to create social hubs on their own stand-alone hosted Web sites... As an attorney representing both trademark owners and domain name registries, I see chi.mp as a unique situation. more

U.S. Government Extends Its Cooperative Agreement With Verisign, Green Lights .Com Price Increase

NTIA released a statement today announcing the agreement reached to extend and modify Verisign's Cooperative Agreement. more

Recovering Domain Names Lost to Fraudulent Transfer

Domain Names composed of generic terms and combinations – dictionary words, random letters, and short strings – have achieved ascending values in the secondary market. DNJournal.com (Ron Jackson) reports on his year to date chart, for example (just a random sampling from the charts) in August 2019 joyride.com was sold for $300,000, in June voice.com sold for $30 million, in July rx.com sold for $1 million, and in January california.com sold for $3 million... The magnitude of the reported sales suggests that businesses have come to depend on resellers than go to the trouble of inventing brand names from scratch. more

ICANN Senate Hearing: The Battle Between Intellectual Property and Multistakeholderism

The US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Hearing on ICANN's Expansion of Top Level Domain Names on December 8, 2001 was all about strategy. The strategy was simple: while the world has its attention turned to the debate on the copyright legislative proposals of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, let's have another ICANN hearing and try to re-open trademark protection for new gTLDs. more

Verizon vs. iREIT et al Court Documents: What Can We Learn?

Verizon filed sued against iREIT and Domain Marketplace a couple of weeks ago in a Texas court, alleging cybersquatting. David Kesmodel's blog broke the story, and I used the PACER system to obtain the court filings, which are posted here. Exhibit 5 makes fascinating reading, especially when point #43 in the main statement of claim says "Exhibit 5 details only one famous trademark for each letter of the alphabet." more

US Senate Committee Holds Hearing on ICANN’s New TLD Expansion

As previously noted, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation today held a full committee hearing on ICANN's expansion of top level domains (TLDs). The hearing was held to examine the merits and implications of the program and ICANN's efforts to address concerns raised. ICANN will begin accepting applications for new TLDs on January 12, 2012. more

New Regime for Registration of .fr

Association Francaise pour le Nommage Internet en Cooperation ("AFNIC"), the domain name authority managing the French country code top level domain, is introducing a new regime for registration of .fr domain names. Among the main changes, the new regime abolishes any "right to the name". Until now an applicant for registration of a .fr domain name must prove that the domain name reflects its company name, business name or trade mark that is in force in France. more

New CIRA Whois Policy Strikes Balance Between Privacy and Access

My weekly technology law column focuses this week on the new CIRA whois policy that is scheduled to take effect on June 10, 2008. The whois issue has attracted little public attention, yet it has been the subject of heated debate within the domain name community for many years. It revolves around the whois database, a publicly accessible, searchable list of domain name registrant information (as in "who is" the registrant of a particular domain name). more

Information Protection for the Domain Name System: Encryption and Minimization

In previous posts in this series, I've discussed a number of applications of cryptography to the DNS, many of them related to the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). In this final blog post, I'll turn attention to another application that may appear at first to be the most natural, though as it turns out, may not always be the most necessary: DNS encryption. (I've also written about DNS encryption as well as minimization in a separate post on DNS information protection.) more

Unlawful Targeting of Trademarks and Consumers in Registering Domain Names

Unlike trademark applications which go through a lengthy examination process before advancing to registration, anyone (anywhere in the world) can register a domain name identical or confusingly similar to a trademark - instantly and no questions asked, at least, in the traditional space (the legacy gTLDs)! With the new gTLDs registrants will receive notice of possible infringement if the brands are registered with the Trademark Mark Clearing House, but notices do not function as injunctions to block registrants from registering infringing names. more

The Rise of a Secondary Market for Domain Names (Part 4/4): Facilitating the Secondary Market

The defining of rights in the UDRP process is precisely what WIPO and ICANN contemplated, but it is unlikely they foresaw the destination of the jurisprudence. Since its inception, UDRP Panels have adjudicated over 75,000 disputes, some involving multiple domain names. (These numbers, incidentally, are a tiny fraction of the number of registered domain names in legacy and new top-level domains, which exceeded 320 million in the first quarter 2017). more

Dell Loses Key Customer Support Domain Name for a Month, Site Exposed to Questionable Content

The website designated by Dell Inc. to help customers recover from malicious software and other computer maladies may have been hijacked for a few weeks this summer by people who specialize in deploying said malware, reports Brian Krebs in KrebsOnSecurity. more

Domain Enforcement in a Post-GDPR World

The implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and ICANN's conservative temporary policy, which favors privacy and limits registrar liability, has made domain enforcement against cybersquatters, cyber criminals and infringement more difficult, expensive and slow. With heightened concerns over privacy following high-profile breaches of consumer data and its subsequent illicit use and distribution, there is no question that consumer data protection practices would come under scrutiny. more

GDPR and WHOIS - Winners and Losers

I think we are all hoping that when ICANN meets with the DPAs (Digital Protection Authorities) a clear path forward will be illuminated. We are all hoping that the DPAs will provide definitive guidance regarding ICANN's interim model and that some special allowance will be made so that registrars and registries are provided with additional time to implement a GDPR-compliant WHOIS solution. more