Trademark enforcement against infringing domains on the Internet is frequently likened to playing Whac-A-Mole. Just as soon as you eliminate one, up pops another, and another, etc.
Dan’s post from last week on the most recent land rush on the Internet — with the creation of almost infinite Internet real estate — may be a
–Susan Perera, Attorney
Earlier this week ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved a major change to top-level Internet domains (TLDs).
Soon we will no longer be limited to the standard 22 top-level domains including .com, .org, and .net. In fact, your brand could soon be its own top-level domain. For
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
I have blogged numerous times in the past about domain name related issues that are concerns for brand owners: domaining, typosquatting, and the planned roll-out of new gTLD domains. This last issue–the expansion of the top-level domain space from a relative handful of top-level domains (like .com, .net, .org,
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
Last week, I went to the Internet to look up some information. I opened the browser and hastily typed “wkipedia.com” in the address bar and was met with this page:
I stared at it for several seconds, during many of which I seriously thought that Wikipedia had updated its home landing page and puzzle-globe design. The Google and Ebay search bars eventually convinced me that I was in the wrong place, and after staring at the banner for several more seconds, I realized that I had directly navigated not to wikipedia.com (which lands at wikipedia.org), but instead to “wkipedia.com,” just like I typed, omitting the first “i.”
Typical typosquatters use pay-per-click pages (examples here) to monetize their typo domain names, which is bad enough. The Wkipedia.com typosquatter is using a look-alike of a registered trademark that, at least for me, creates confusion, which elevates the issue. It is no longer “mere” typosquatting, but this may very well be flat out trademark infringement.
Typosquatting profits from traffic, and it does not discriminate as to whether the traffic is generated from a domain held by a for-profit company or one held by a not-for-profit company. The difference in battling the beast is that a for-profit company often has a larger budget to combat the problem. Unless or until better tools are developed to battle typosquatting on the back end, the best defense remains a good offense, and all the more for non-profits. If you are planning to start a non-profit with a heavy web presence, make sure that your budget includes the purchase and holding of as many typographical variants of central domains as are feasible to purchase.
An image of the Wikipedia landing page is below the jump for comparison.Continue Reading Typosquatting: Not Just a For-Profit Problem
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
What a difference a year makes. Last year, I wrote about the .CM top-level domain as a potentially popular typographical variant of the ubiquitous .COM. In that post, I mentioned that it did not appear that widespread commercialization of .CO was in the works.
Well, .CO domains are available and out there.
We thought we had arrived when DuetsBlog made a listing of the Top 100 Branding Blogs, and it also was kind of nice when the DuetsBlog mark became federally registered, but now it appears we have reached yet another level of notoriety, appreciation, and respect altogether, as DuetsBlog is now receiving the most thoughtful of email solicitations all the
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
Here’s a trademark that has always amused me:
You can find it on a page of FedEx’s website, and it is on many FedEx boxes and trucks. As Steve has pointed out before, and as probably everybody older than the age of reason knows, FedEx is short for Federal Express,
An interesting trademark case recently was filed in federal district court in Minnesota, Chevron Intellectual Property LLC et al v. MDW Equity Partners, LLC, a pdf copy of the complaint here.
As beleaguered BP‘s once valuable goodwill and reputation continues to flounder in the court of public opinion with the tragic gulf oil spill
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
I have previously attempted to sound the alarm about why companies should be concerned about direct navigation on the Internet (here here here and here), but I learned this week from The FairWinds Blog that not only does Yahoo! Inc. (operator of the photo sharing website Flickr and owner of
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
Pot luck post today, but all related to the wonderful world of domain names: