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Experience with Fighting Domain Farming
Lost_my_regs writes "I had a .com domain name relevant only to me, no legal trademark, registered and hosted at a provider that went bust. When attempting to re-host the domain I discovered, to my unpleasant surprise, that the domain is now registered by a domain farming company (name removed). My question is: Is there any way to claim back my domain?"
The domain now has no value to another as they cannot use or sell it without violating the trademark. You also have a much stronger position in the various appeal processes.
I would say start lowering it. They come back with $5,000: come back with $50.
Those people are out for easy money. Easy money should be peanuts or less.
Be prepared to walk so that they'll lose and they'll lose because the domain name is only good to the person who's responsible for this article. Meaning, after they're registration time is up, they'll abandon it themselves. Paying them is to only get it back sooner.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Wait. Don't contact them. Don't make any waves.
Often - very often - a domain farmer picks up the domain for just a week or so (no matter how long the WHOIS says it's really registered for) - and waits to see if the pay-per-click ads generate enough revenue to make it worth keeping. So often the best thing you can do is...nothing. Don't visit the site (generates traffic), don't contact them (tells them they have a chance of milking you for $), don't do anything - just sit and wait. Often the name will get dropped and another farmer will pick it up immediately - but if you're patient and check back in with the WHOIS, you should eventually see it free again for long enough to grab it.
This may sound ridiculous, but it's how the domain name economy is currently working, courtesy of weak ICAAN rules. Make it work in your favor - you want that one name, but they want 100,000 that generate enough revenue to make up the low ($3.50/year? can't remember) ICAAN fees necessary to hold on to it. (They know WIPO arbitration is going to cost you $1500+legal fees, so in that route the numbers are on their side.)
This has worked with the .com versions of two different domain names held by non-profit clients of mine just this year. Good luck.
WTF? Domain-squatting should be eliminated, and it's perfectly reasonable to expect there to be a process by which a case of domain-squatting can be resolved properly.
Take GoDaddy.com, a domain registrar who fairly often blackmails their customers for hundreds of dollars on domains they keep that should have been allowed to expire and been available publicly again. ICANN should warn them, and revoke their license if they continue in anti-trust behavior. It shouldn't be allowed in the first place, I'm saying, and ICANN should make sure it doesn't happen secondly.
Of course 'the market' should stop going to GoDaddy and thus 'the market' should decide, but that shouldn't prevent ICANN from implementing something effective to stop problems at the source.
Registrars in the habit of making you check a box agreeing to a service arrangement with a clause basically giving them power of attorney 'on your behalf' should find in court that such a clause, at least, is void. Likewise, GoDaddy's clause that they will keep a domain you do not renew 'on your behalf' but ask for exorbitant fees for doing so should been seen for what it is.
And if GoDaddy was forced to release expired domains back into the public pool there would still be this problem of domain snipers picking up the domain from the public pool to do that same exact thing. Just because someone else will do it doesn't mean GoDaddy should be allowed to. I do wonder how one could demonstrate that domain squatting is what is occurring without squatters finding a loop-hole or way to appear legit, or otherwise what rule would help solve this problem, but that doesn't mean none exist.
You YELL that we don't need more rules and regulations, but the majority of domains registered today are squatted hoping to make money on advertising from inadvertent visitors or selling the domain to someone who wants to use it, actually, for real. This is a shit-situation that should be counter-acted.
If you let your domain expire, it should go back to being available to the public. The fact that it doesn't go back into the public pool makes me sick, and more-over hurts the public while being illegit. Half of the domains I want to register have place-holder pages as they wait to ask hundreds of percent of the registration cost for the domains use. That fact indicates their is something broken with the domain name marketing system.
The stock markets may be much more detrimental and there are probably some larger issues there, but they do occasionally convict for insider trading, and ICANN should take a tip from that and not allow domain sniping. If you know that someone is potentially interested in a domain available to the public and you go and register that name in order to get that person or entity to buy it from you, that's wrong and should be illegal. What reason do you have for saying we shouldn't have a process for resolving the illegitimacy of that action?
As for all the squatters betting on domain names that have general appeal, it's true that this is just as illegitimate, but at least it doesn't target individual persons or entities. I'm not convinced that you should be able to hold on to a domain name (reserve it) for longer than a year without having a particular use for it. This is a less black-and-white situation though.
It's true that we've heard horror stories from the days of supposed trademark holders taking away legit domains from legitimate domain holders - let's learn for those lessons, and from lessons of today, and create namespaces (fix the ones we've got) that have more common sense and repel more detrimental registrations...