DOMAIN NAME SURVEILLANCE
DEFENCE STRATEGIES
The recent exponential growth in the number of registered domain
names poses problems for trademark owners worldwide, says Alessandra Ferreri.
Since the mid-1990s, we have witnessed an exponential growth in the registration of domain names coinciding with distinguishing signs (sign boards, corporate names, trademarks, trade names) owned by market operators. We can safely say that there is currently no shop, firm or business entrepreneur that has not registered the domain name corresponding to its own most celebrated trademarks or the name of its products or its own business name, or even the generic name of the product being offered on the market.
It is sufficient to remember that, each month, for the .com suffix alone, an average of 668,000 domain names are registered; in 25 years, a full 78 million .com addresses have been registered.
Te increase in registrations has naturally led to an increase in the number of disputes over domain names and, in particular, in the conflicts that arise between domain names and other distinguishing signs. Te increase in these disputes is caused by two different phenomena.
On the one hand, there is the now notorious practice of domain-grabbing: an increasing number of people are ‘blanket registering’ domain names coinciding with the most famous trademarks belonging to others, with the clear purpose of reselling the domain name at an extremely high price to the legitimate owner of the homonymous rights.
Over the years, domain-grabbers or cybersquatters have developed and demonstrated increasing imagination in their methods of grabbing domain names corresponding to the distinguishing signs
www.worldipreview.com
of others: from domain names coinciding precisely with the rights of others, there are now domain names containing variants of the homonymous distinguishing signs, consisting of added hyphens and interjection signs, or spelling or so-called typing errors (typosquatting). In addition to the traditional extensions such as .com, .net, .biz and .info (gTLDs), registrations have been made with all possible suffixes, as they have been gradually approved and introduced onto the Internet (such as .mobi, .cat, .aero, .biz and .travel).
Domain-grabbing is currently concentrated, for example, on domain names that have the extensions of new countries in the emerging economies (China and India): there are therefore numerous domain names coinciding with the trademarks of others with the suffixes
.co.in, .in, .cn,
.com.cn,
.net.cn and
.org.cn, as well as 34 sub-suffixes corresponding to each of the Chinese provinces.
However, there is another reason determining the increase in conflict between the owners of domain names and between the domain names and distinguishing signs of another competitor. It is clear that, with the registration of a domain name corresponding to one of its own rights, even the smallest entrepreneur can obtain an international showcase, since all domain names, with any extension, are visible throughout the world. Te greater the visibility acquired, the higher the risk that conflict will arise between those competitors that have similar distinguishing signs (such as two entrepreneurs that have a highly similar company name) or that market the same products, but
World Intellectual Property Review May/June 2010
39
SURVEILLANCE:
ADR & DN
©
iStockphoto.com / M-X-K
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