Traverse Legal Cybersquatting News Alerts for Monday, July 14, 2008

A new version of typosquatting has recently come into play with ICANN’s allowance of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).  This new type of typosquatting consists of the registration of non-standard characters to replace letters in the URL, such as pàypal.com. 

TechNewsWorld has an interesting but short statement on the importance of protecting your domain names from cybersquatters.

The city of Carlsbad, CA has filed suit against an alleged cybersquatter for the use of the city’s golf course trademark in association with products and online.  Prince Reza Shah, the accused, claims that the city is infringing on his trademark.  Shah registered for the THE CROSSINGS AT CHANDLER mark, along with others, in 2006 and 2007.  The city has opposed those applications.  Shah owns many domain names, including tiger-woods.mobi and trump-golf.mobi, and defiantly claims that neither of those two famous people have come after him.

A group of Russian clowns, members of the Moscow Cats Theater, are suing the Seattle Repertory Theater, along with Ticketmaster and other theaters, for abetting cybersquatting, trademark infringement, unfair competition, as well as other causes of action.  The Moscow Cats claim that the Seattle theater allowed a group of imposters who claimed that they were the Moscow Cats to perform a similar routine.  The complaint charges that a US promoter of the imposters filed for federal registration for THE MOSCOW CATS mark shortly after a former member of the Cats broke off to form his own group with the promoter.  The original Moscow Cats are seeking $10 million in damages.

Comments

[Domain hijack lawyer]

Hiring a good lawyer who specializes in domain name hijack situations is a good idea when you are confronted with one of these situations. Cybersquatting and domain hijack laws are pretty complicated. Even trademark lawyers seem to get confused since they don't practice in this area all the time.