Cybersquatting & Domain Dispute Attorneys / Lawyers

Traverse Legal Obtains $74,500 Statutory Damage Award Against Overdrive, Inc. for Bad Faith Cybersquatting.

Traverse Legal's cybersquatting law lawyers obtained a statutory damage award under the ACPA on behalf of their client in the amount of $74,500 against Overdrive, Inc., a distributor of digital products such as ebooks, audiobooks, music and videos, for bad faith cybersquatting and breach of contract.

The US District Court also ordered Overdrive, Inc. to transfer over the infringing domain name "forwardreviews.com" to the plaintiff.

Case Name:  ForeWord Magazine, Inc. v Overdrive, Inc., United States District Court, Western District of Michigan, Southern Division, No. 1:10-cv-01144. The case is on appeal as of March 2013.

OverDrive is funded by Insight Venture Partners, a private-equity firm that focuses on technology companies.  Overdrive’s key products and services:   OverDrive Media Console, OverDrive Read, OverDrive Media Station, Content Reserve.

UPDATE June 20, 2013: "The matter has been resolved by agreement of the parties and the appeal dismissed. The matter is now closed.

CitizenHawk UDRP Complaint Fail

When you use a service which tends to boilerplate all of your pleadings, you sometimes get what you pay for.  CitizenHawk does a variety of different online brand protection activities.  But a bunch of what it does is automated and boilerplate. 

Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy: UDRP WIPO vs. NAF Arbitration. Which Should I Choose?

A UDRP complaint seeking arbitration to transfer a domain name which you believe is infringing your trademark mark to you and to obtain control of that domain name. A common question we often have is whether or not there is a difference between the various arbitration authorities who can hear your UDRP dispute.

Cybersquatting Lawyer wins UDRP Case Against Cybersquatter.

Marc Randazza (Complainant) of The Randazza Legal Group wins UDRP action against Cybersquatter Crystal Cox (Respondnent) for the bad faith registration and use of domain names incorporating the Complainant’s personal name. 

Further, the Respondent, in registering multiple domain names which each incorporated the Complainant’s personal name or surname – all of which are identical to  corresponding ones of the Complainant’s RANDAZZA Marks, certainly denied the Complainant the right to reflect any of those marks in a domain name and exhibited a pattern of conduct in doing so.

Lastly, the Respondent’s websites, to which the disputed domain names resolved, contained pay-per-click (click-through) links to third-party websites, including that of a competitor of the Complainant.  Obviously, in doing so, the Respondent relied on the confusion she caused to Internet users who thought they were  reaching the Complainant’s website but in actuality were diverted to one of the Respondent’s websites instead for her own pecuniary benefit in subsequently collecting click-through revenue as a result of some of those users interacting with those sites – revenue she would not have gained but for the diversion, and denying the Complainant legal business and his resulting revenue which he and his law firm may have otherwise received had those users not been so diverted.

The panel concluded that the respondent violated bad faith provisions under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.

Hence, the Panel concludes that the Respondent violated paragraph 4(a)(iii) of the Policy including both the general bad faith provision in paragraph 4(b) and also the specific exemplary bad faith conduct set forth in each of paragraphs 4(b)(ii), (iii) and (iv) thereof.

 

Related Articles:

Randazza v. Cox Arbitration Decision

Judge rules, again, that blogger Crystal Cox is not a journalist. You know why? Because she ISN’T a journalist.

Full Decision Below:

Randazza v. Cox

Another Cybersquatting Judgment in Favor of Plaintiff

Here are the lessons that we've learned as a result of actually getting out in front of a judge and a jury, and trying these ACPA cases. Number one, they are challenging cases because there's so little case law out there to help judges understand cybersquatting law issues. The other thing that is very clear is that so few judges have trademark law experience, let alone cybersquatting law experience that you have to be very careful about educating the judge. 

Cybersquatters Beware: KeepAlert Helps Companies Identify Online Brand Attacks

We’re broadcasting from the International Trademark Association Conference in Washington D.C.  Over 9,000 trademark attorneys and in-house counsel from around the world are here to talk about brands, brand protections, trademarks, trademark registration.  Today, we’re talking, again, with Anthony Don, CTO of keepalert.com a monitoring platform that helps trademark owners and their lawyers gather information about brand attacks on the internet, help them prioritize that information, assess that information and capture that information for future use.  Anthony, welcome to the show.

KeepAlert Software Provides A+ Online Brand and Domain Management.

Protecting your trademarks and brands from attack on the Internet continues to become more difficult.  From cybersquattters who register variations of your trademarks or a domain name as their own in order to divert your business and customers, to keyword advertising infringement and social media trademark infringement, your company needs help protecting tradeamrks online.  The most challenging aspect of online brand protection is identifying, categorizing and prioritizing the various problems which occur.  At the International Trademark Association Conference in Washington DC, I was able to meet with numerous employees from KeepAlert.com, which provides one of the most comprehensive online brand protection platforms I have seen.  Further, the pricing makes sense on a return on investment basis.  The folks at KeepAlert provided me access to their platform and have been allowing me to test the platform since early May, 2012.  Here is an Interview of Anythony Don, CTO of KeepAlert. 

 

Play: KeepAlert Software Provides A+ Online Brand and Domain Management.
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With: Anthony Don

Sponsored by: Traverse Cybersquatting Law

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Tales from a Cybersquatting Law Lawsuit

Now the first thing you need to know is that the ACPA, the Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, has a very limited number of cases that have been decided under it. The language of the statute is fairly clear, but, as with any law, there's room for disagreement about what the statute really means. One of the defenses a cybersquatter will put forward if you sue them under the ACPA is that they did not have the bad faith intent to profit from your trademark when they registered, used, or trafficked in the domain.

Welcome to Cybersquatting Law Radio where domain name, cybersquatting, and trademark domain name issues are always the hottest topic of discussion.  Whether you are a trademark owner who believes they are a victim of cybersquatting or a domain owner wrongly accused of trademark infringement, you will find all the tips you need to protect your rights right here. 

My name is cybersquatting law attorney Enrico Schaefer. Today what we're going to do is we're going to talk a little bit about a lawsuit that we concluded recently, an Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act lawsuit brought by our client, the plaintiff, against a number of defendants who had registered en masse, not tens, not dozens, but hundreds of typographical variations of our client's famous and incontestable trademarks. There were a lot of lessons learned along the way, and I want to share some of those lessons with you as we talk about what kinds of defenses you might expect to see if you file an anti-cybersquatting consumer protection act lawsuit as a plaintiff against a defendant in court.

Don’t be a Cybersquatter: How To Avoid Trademark Cybersquatting under the ACPA and UDRP.

...the whole concept of cybersquatting is something that's foreign to many people. Maybe, they've never heard the term cybersquatting before. They may register domain names for fun, or maybe even for a living without a high level understanding of cybersquatting law. And all of a sudden they find themselves being accused of cybersquatting. The last thing you want to do is be a cybersquatter. 

Cybersquatting and the Nuclear Option: What the Protect IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) Means to Domainers

Cybersquatting law addresses trademark infringement under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP Policy) and the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA).   But a new law which will directly affect domainers is gaining traction in Washington, D.C..  The Protect IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are working their way through Congress and appear to have enough traction to lead to the conclusion that some variation of these bills may eventually pass Congress.  The Protect IP Act seeks to kill websites (i.e. domain names) which engage in copyright and trademark infringement when those websites/domain names are “dedicated to infringing activities.”  Essentially, The Protect IP Act works at the DNS level.  A website is taken down by pulling the domain name from domain name servers which serve up results in the United States.  Essentially, the domain name is blacklisted from the Internet if it is determined that the primary activity of that website is to engage in trademark infringement or copyright infringement.  Of course, trademark infringement on the Internet is primarily expressed by cybersquatting.