CYBERSQUATTING
“BRANDS CAN BE FACED WITH A VERY LARGE NUMBER OF LITIGIOUS DOMAIN REGISTRATIONS AND IT IS NOT ALWAYS FINANCIALLY VIABLE FOR THEM TO TAKE ACTION IN EVERY CASE.”
web users to a ‘parking’ page. These pages have sponsored links that redirect users to other websites. The cybersquatter receives a payment every time somebody clicks on one of the ads.
Other types of abuse all have serious financial consequences for brands. Counterfeit e-commerce sites represent 6 percent of all cases. Businesses can also
have their
reputations tarnished by domain names with websites that attack their brand or contain adult content. Pornsquatting represented 1 percent of WIPO procedures in 2011.
Protecting your brand online
‘sale’ (2.4 percent) and ‘www’ (2.3 percent). Cybersquatters also use terms that are related to the activity of the brand they are targeting so that their domains appear relevant, and sometimes even official.
Twenty-five percent of all arbitration
complaints concern domain names that are identical to the brand.
Sixteen percent concern cases of typosquatting where the domain name has been misspelled or had letters added.
Uses of fraudulent domain names
Ninety-one percent of domain names in UDRP cases are active and 9 percent are inactive.
Traffic hijacking is the most common form of cybersquatting. More than 50 percent of cases studied for the white paper redirect
www.worldipreview.com
Some trademark holders have a zero tolerance policy regarding abusive domain name registrations, and engage UDRP procedures against every domain name that uses their brand. ‘LEGO’ alone accounts for 5 percent of all WIPO UDRP decisions in 2011. This however, is a strategy that is both costly and ineffective if trademark owners then abandon the domain names they have recovered, as they are immediately registered again by cybersquatters.
Businesses need an effective domain name protection strategy. What are the relevant country codes? What are the spelling variations of their brand? What are the internationalised domain name (IDN) translations of the brand name?
This domain name protection strategy is then applied to an online surveillance programme that identifies potentially litigious domain names that have been registered. This surveillance not only detects identical domain name registrations, but also similar and approximate spellings of the brand name (typosquatting) and monitors the website
itself, detecting any changes in its use. Brands can be faced with a very large number of litigious domain registrations and it is not always financially viable for them to take action in every case. If a domain name that is registered reverts to a registrar landing page it is not highly prejudicial to the brand owner, but they need to know quickly if the website becomes a counterfeit e-commerce site.
Litigious domain names that have been detected need to be categorised and tracked according to their use: e-commerce site, parking page, registrar landing page, redirection, adult content, inactive, etc, in order to concentrate efforts on the websites that present a real and serious threat.
The online brand-monitoring platform Keep Alert automates this type of domain name monitoring. Monitoring results are provided with time-stamped screenshots and automatic categorisation of the type of web page hosted. Keep Alert detects and alerts you to the creation of new domain names, abandoned domain names or those that have changed in use and content.
Te platform covers all generic and country extensions as well as second level country domains, totalling some 750 domain name extensions. Te new gTLDs will be added to the platform as they are delegated by ICANN.
Stéphanie Lacroix is a corporate account manager at Keep Alert. She can be contacted at:
s.lacroix@
keepalert.com
Stéphanie Lacroix specialises in online brand monitoring and domain names. She joined Keep Alert in 2010 and is in charge of its international development. Lacroix is an active participant at
and INTA (International Trademark Association) events.
ICANN
Trademarks Brands and the Internet Volume 1, Issue 3
33
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