Cybersquatting Cases On The Rise, And Will Only Get Worse

from the get-with-the-system dept

2008 saw the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization handle more cybersquatting cases than ever before -- 2,329. Michael Geist makes the case that things aren't as bad on this front as they might seem, but the head of WIPO says the issue will only get worse as ICANN prepares to throw open the top-level domain system, which will undoubtedly lead to even more disputes. For instance, something like ".apple" will certainly be a magnet for disputes. Who should get to claim it? Apple Computer, Apple Corps, a trade group of apple farmers, or somebody else with a legitimate tie to the word apple? ICANN's plans to throw things open on the TLD front could be better than it getting to determine which TLDs people can use, but it certainly looks like it's going to come at the cost of a ridiculous amount of arguments over who gets to own specific TLDs. It's easy to say that ICANN and WIPO should try to get out ahead of the issue, and for what it's worth, the WIPO exec says they're working to create "pre- and post-delegation procedures". But it's hard to imagine that they're going to be able to really do much to limit the number of disputes when the new TLDs open up, given how many parties could have legitimate claims to the same ones.

Filed Under: cybersquatting, trademark, wipo

School Wins Cybersquatting Case, But Was It Worth It?

from the no-this-isn't-a-school-site-.com dept

A school in the UK has won a three-year domain-squatting case against some Canadian domain parkers. The school, called Framlingham College, wanted to set up shop at framlinghamcollege.co.uk, but the domain parkers beat them to the punch, and put up a page with links to, among other things, online dating sites. Apparently these sites then had links to "mature porn," which upset the administrators of the Christian school, and gave the BBC justification for the tasty headline "School's links to porn site end." It seems right that the school was able to wrest control of the site back from domain parkers, illustrating that in this instance, the dispute and resolution system worked. That said, was it such an important battle? The head of the school notes "I have no doubt that people who were seriously interested in the college will have found this site and then run a mile" -- so it's not as if people were being fooled into thinking it was the school's actual site. And there are these things these days called search engines that many people use to locate sites they're looking for, rather than just trying random URLs. Perhaps the College would have been better off using some of the resources it devoted to this battle on search-engine optimization, since its real site doesn't seem to appear in the first five pages of Google results for a search on its name. Isn't people being able to find the school's site more important than the URL it uses?

Filed Under: cybersquatting, framlingham college, school, uk