StopScum

Amazon defeats them. A case study.

Every day, millions of unique visitors are generated by surfers who misstype a domain name in their browser and land up on a Cybersquatters site. The recent Amazon story for your reading pleasure:

Cybersquatters, typo-squatters, and parties who have tacked keywords onto trademark-protected domain names were hit hard this week in two separate rulings by the National Arbitration Forum.

Amazon.com took action against two individuals who had registered domain names it claimed violated its registered trademark. Arbitration was carried out under ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.

One of the individuals, Michele Dinoila of SZK.com, maintained 12 domains that the online retailer claimed bore a "confusing similarity" to Amazon.com. The dozen domains included keyword meshing URLs such as "amazonappliances.com," typos like "wwwamazon.com," and a foreign translation of "amazzone.com." The sites in question contained links to Amazon's competitors, including BarnesandNoble.com and Booksamillion.com.

Dinoila, based in Italy, is named in more than 20 other decisions and has been called a "recidivist cybersquatter" by Amazon.com.

Amazon won. The slime bags lost. Source: http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3554411

Tips for Site Owners

1) Contrary to popular opinion, the very first thing you should do is register every possible "typo" and keyword leaching domain name. Start with your real domain name and register .com, .net, .org and then continue down the list with typos and keyword leaching. Set up these additional domains to redirect to your primary/real domain. Don't forget the loosers who will register the "-" (hyphen) incarnation of your fooproduct.com domain name like this: foo-product.com. If you find one already registered and you don't hold a Trademark on it, watch the expire date and try and register it as soon as it expires. At one time, I had over 15 domain names registered to prevent the leaches from using them. This even included a branded service on my site which I may wish to spin off into it's own site.

2) Register your domain name as a Trademark via the United States Trademark Electronic Search System (Tess) site. Consult with your attorney if you are not comfortable doing this yourself.

3) BEFORE you register a domain name, do some research via the United States Trademark Electronic Search System (Tess) site. Use the search feature to determine if the "mark" is already registered. Don't leach via registering a domain name like "keywordamazon.com" and or anything even remotely related to the registered mark. Many mark holders actively spider the net for infractions and for the most part they are prepared to play very serious hard ball as the above Amazon case illustrates. If you find a "gray area" in your search before registration, send a very polite and civil email and fax to the mark holder and ask them for permission to register the domain. Wait for an answer before you register. Save your correspondence. For example, Microsoft owns the mark for "Windows" but is perfectly happy to see other domain names registered which use this mark in the name like "windowstips" or "windowsbbs". You should still contact them to cover your bases.

4) Honest mistakes can happen to a Webmaster. If you receive a legal notice that your domain name infringes on an existing mark which was registered before your domain name, surrender it at once. Use the examples above in the Amazon case to guide you. Don't play games, don't listen to 13 year old kids on Forums, just play nice and surrender it for the cost of the registration and ONLY this amount.

5) I certainly don't feel your pain. All to common is the following plea: "but dude, I have spent the last 2 years building up my site. It makes a ton of money. I'm only 18 years of age and never knew anything about marks. This is really going to hurt me dude." Sorry Charlie, I have absolutely no sympathy for you. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. Surrender your leaching domain at once or expect to find yourself in serious legal trouble. Learn from your mistake and don't do it again. Tell others about your mistake and encourage them to play nice and respect laws.

Tips for Affiliate Networks

Your not fooling anyone with your active participation in this deplorable leaching mess. Many of you permit the leachers and slime bags to join your network and earn money from sites which clearly infringe on marks and or cause confusion in the marketplace. STOP this practice at once! Just how much time does it take to search for a mark? Have you been living under a rock? When you see an affiliates domain name like "mickeymouse(insert whatever you wish) .com just reject it. Refuse to do business with these Cybersquatting leaches and the incidence of this abuse would immediately drop to a near zero level. Use your TOS and email to educate your affiliates about this issue and tell them you won't tolerate or accept their leach sites. If you find one, they forfit all income earned.

Additional Resources:

WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center
Returns ownership of domains to the rightful owner which have been stolen or registered with the intent to "leach" via a typo or Trademark violation. Much faster than legal action.

The National Arbitration Forum
High litigation costs and the time-consuming nature of lawsuits can be a deterrent to anyone needing to solve a legal problem. That's why from large complex cases to smaller commercial and individual claims, parties trust the resolution experts at the National Arbitration Forum.