Cybersquatting the Social Networks: A New Trademark Risk

WebProNews has recently published a couple alarming articles concerning name squatting on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. The author, Chris Crum, correctly notes in his article titled “Cybersquatting Goes Social” that cybersquatting continues to be a growing problem on the Internet (see Figure 1.).  However, he brings to light another growing problem that trademark owners face as cybersquatters partake in the unethical and illegal practice of registering trademark protected brands with the popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.  

Cybersquatting on Politician Names: Sarah Palin Is the Latest Victim of Squatting

We have previously blogged about the phenomena of cybersquatting on the personal names of famous people, including politicians. Political Candidate Cybersquatting: Hillary Clinton's Name Most Squatted

Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin is relatively new to the scene.  We thought we’d take a look and see how long it took before her fame was reflected in the number of cybersquatters trying to cash in on her new political status.  Here is a domain typo report provided by Domain Tools.

Celebrity Cybersquatting: Why Don't Famous People Protect Their Domain Names?

Celebrity cybersquatting is becoming increasingly important.  Traverse Legal's cybersquatting attorneys work with celebrities and their agencies to provide global online name and brand protection.  If you are a celebrity, or agent working on behalf of a celebrity, who is trying to protect a celebrity name in cyberspace, feel free to contact one of our domain dispute attorneys for a free evaluation or call 866.936.7447 (international toll free).

Cybersquatter offering threesome with Scarlett Johansson! | Latest News

The seemingly fake website isn”t so much of a surprise as the domain that it sits on – scarlettjohansson.com.

While the website has an offer that’’s hard to believe, it’’s even more incredible that the actress could so easily fall prey to a cybersquatter.

For over a decade, Hollywood stars have been the target of cybersquatters – people who buy famous-sounding web domains in hope of benefiting from related publicity.

Web domains including madonna.com, juliaroberts.com and piercebrosnan.com have all appeared in cybersquatting cases before the web’’s governing UN body the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). (ANI)

Technorati Tags: Scarlett Johansson, domain name, cybersquatting

ICANN Tries to Put An End to Domain Tasting and Opens the Door to New gTLDs

It is an exciting time for the development of the Internet, and it has gone almost unnoticed.  A number of developments in the domain name world have occurred today.  ICANN has paved the way to outlaw domain tasting at its Paris meeting this afternoon.  In April 2007, a supermajority of the GNSO (Generic Names Supporting Organization) council voted to discourage domain purchase grace periods in which refunds are given for the purchase of a domain within a set number of days, typically five.  In May 2007, ICANN's at-large advisory committee again asked the GNSO to look at the domain tasting issue, and they came up with five problem areas to address in regards to domain tasting.  Today, ICANN enacted a proposal that will prohibit those registrars that offer the grace periods from offering a refund for domain names that exceed 10% of the registrar's net registrations for the month or, alternatively, 50 domain names, whichever is greater. 

Additionally, the ICANN board voted to approve a massive expansion to the available domain names.  This new expansion, which must still be ratified by the ICANN board (expected in 2009), will allow applicants to the gTLD process to select their own suffixes.  This recommendation paves the way to allow trademark holders to select more marketable suffixes, e.g. diet.pepsi or pumps.reebok, and it allows cities to apply for suffixes (e.g. .newyork & .chicago).  It will be interesting to see how this affects trademark holders, and how it will affect the value of the current premium TLDs such as .com. 

Fighting Cybersquatters Will Potentially Enhance, Extend and Strengthen Your Trademark Rights

Some companies take laxed view of cybersquatted domains, including typosquatters who are in clear violation of the UDRP and ACPA.  To often, a trademark holder analyzes the matter purely in terms of traffic.  They assume, wrongly in some instances, that a typosquatted domain isn’t generating much traffic anyway.  They may not understand direct navigation or fail to employ the analytic tools available in order to measure traffic being diverted from their trademark protected websites.

Typo-Domains Pose an Email Security Threat: Users Also Mistype Domains in Email Addresses

Companies and political organizations should put more effort into registering mis-typed versions of their primary domain, not only to protect visitors to their Web sites but also to prevent e-mails from accidentally leaking out, a security researcher said on Wednesday.

As part of his investigation, Friedrichs registered 124 domains consisting of common misspellings of the primary domains of candidates in the U.S. presidential election. In a strictly controlled experiment, Friedrichs used a mail server to count the number of e-mail messages sent to the misspelled domains, finding 1,121 connection attempts from 12 distinct IP addresses in a 24-hour period. Friedrichs stressed that he did not look at the e-mails and bounced the messages back to the sender to let them know they had misspelled the address.

"It is not clear what is going on here," Friedrichs told attendees. "But if someone sends an e-mail to that company, and makes a typo, the owner of the (fraudulent) domain is going to get the information."

Typosquatting has generally been considered more of a nuisance than a security threat. In 2003, VeriSign caused a stir when it started redirecting queries for nonexistent domain names, likely due to misspellings, to a page controlled by the company. Frausters frequently use domain names that have spellings close to that of a major brand to fool potential victims into believing that the fake site is legitimate.