Newly Formed Pac-12 Conference Claims Cybersquatting On 5-Year-Old Domain

from the prescient-domaining? dept

Reader Clint points us to the news that the Pac-10 conference (a university "sports league" effective) recently added two new schools to the conference, making it the Pac-12 conference now. Of course, after they did this and went to register the domain pac12.com, they discovered that a business man in Utah already owned it, and had owned it for five years -- long before there was any idea of a Pac-12 conference. Yet that didn't stop the conference from sending a cease-and-desist letter, demanding the domain and accusing him of cybersquatting. The guy, Austin Linford, isn't directly using the domain right now, but bought it for a specific project that has been put on hold due to the economy, but which he intends to do something with in the future. Linford has filed for declaratory judgment that his domain does not infringe, and notes that the conference has been changing its name and number quite a bit lately. Apparently the Pac-10 has gone from that designation to the Pac-16, then to the Pac-11 and back to the Pac-10 in just the time since Linford purchased the URL. It seems we see situations like this all too frequently. Where some large entity seems to think it has the right to a particular domain name, just because they're big, even if someone else had registered it years before.

Filed Under: cybersquatting, domains, pac 12