CYBERSQUATTING
KNOWING YOUR ENEMY: CYBERSQUATTING AND NEW GTLDS
With the arrival of new gTLDs, brands will have to be ever more watchful for online infringers, as Stéphanie Lacroix explains.
Domain names are vital to brands and trademark holders. T ey are easy to register and sold on a fi rst come, fi rst served basis—and anyone can buy one. With nearly 300 country (.de,
.co.uk, etc) and generic extensions (.com, .net, etc), there are infi nite possibilities. Abusive domain registrations (cybersquatting) will be on the increase due to the 1,930 applications received by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for the creation of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs).
From traffic hijacking to counterfeit
e-commerce sites, there are many different forms of cybersquatting, all of which present a major problem for brands.
Trademark holders can use established out- of-court procedures in order to protect their brands online and deal with abusive domain names. Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) proceedings are
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judged by international arbitration centres such as the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO), the National
Arbitration Forum, the Czech Arbitration Court and the Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre.
Arbitration decisions are made according to the following criteria:
• T e registered domain name is identical or suffi ciently similar to cause confusion with an existing brand; and
• T e complaint respondent and owner of the domain name has no rights over the brand and no legitimate interest in the brand; and
• The domain name was registered and is used in bad faith.
Complainants pay the cost of the arbitration procedure, which is approximately $1,500
Trademarks Brands and the Internet Volume 1, Issue 3
depending on the arbitration centre that is used, the number of panellists and the number of disputed domains. A UDRP in favour of the complainant results in the cancellation of the domain registration or its transfer to the complainant. There are no awards for damages or costs made to the complainant.
The White Paper on Cybersquatting published by the online brand-monitoring platform Keep Alert revealed that 90 percent of decisions from the main arbitration centres in 2011 were in favour of the complainant, who requested the transfer of the domain name in 99 percent of cases.
The name’s the thing
Fifty-nine percent of litigious domain names contain a brand name that is associated with a generic search term. The most popular terms are ‘online’ (4.3 percent of UDRP decisions in 2011), ‘buy’ (3.3 percent), ‘shop’ (3.2 percent),
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