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Domain-Name Wars, Rise of the Cybersquatters
CWmike writes "When FreeLegoPorn.com began publishing pornographic images created with Lego toys, Lego acted quickly. "The content available on the site consisted of animated mini-figures doing very explicit things. We were not amused," says Peter Kjaer, an attorney for Denmark-based Lego. Lego didn't go to court. Instead it filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization, which ruled in its favor. The domain registrar for FreeLegoPorn.com, GoDaddy.com, eventually shut down the site and transferred the domain name to Lego under ICANN rules. But it's not just Lego and Verizon that are suffering. Green energy is a hot topic, so cybersquatters have been targeting wind and solar energy start-ups. And malicious sites can create havoc with a brand's reputation. Cybersquatting activity rose by 18% last year, with a documented 440,584 cybersquatting sites in the fourth quarter of last year alone, according to MarkMonitor's annual Brandjacking Index report. And WIPO cited an 8% jump in dispute filings in 2008, to 2,329 complaints — a new record. Now, ICANN is preparing to open a potentially unlimited number of new top-level domains as early as the first quarter of 2010."
freelegoporn.com is not cybersquatting. It's parody. The difference is crucial.
Just because a rights-holder says otherwise doesn't make it so.
It sounds like LEGO are being IP bullies. If they can do that to FreeLegoPorn.com, they can probably do it to LEGOSucks.com.
There is a war going on for your mind.
"The domain registrar for FreeLegoPorn.com, GoDaddy.com, eventually shut down the site and transferred the domain name to Lego under ICANN rules." So if a domain name uses a trademarked name in an 'offensive' manner, it's perfectly fine to strip ownership of the domain from the person who registered it and then give it to the company whose name was used? - Similar situation from 2003: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/04/nyregion/04AMBE.html There are a few domain names I wanted that the damn domain name resellers beat me to, all I need to do is trademark a name that is a slight misspelling of the name and it's all mine! - Don't ruin my plan with your silly logic.
"The Y chromosome is genetic. The odds are very good that if you are male then your father was too." -Internet Commenter
How about DonkeyShowLegos.com?
They should make it where the price of a domain doubles for each domain you have registered.
1. $35 ...etc.
2. $70
3. $105
That would raise the annual price of owning two domains to $105 and $210 for three, $420 for four, $840 for five and so on. That keeps the price relatively cheap for people who just want a personal domain or small businesses, but the domain squaters will be rendered out of business for the most part.
I want to see someone squat 1,000 domains at those prices.
As someone pointed out, courts are inconsistent.
Unless FreeLegoPorn knew they judges they would face would rule against them due to locally-binding precedent, they should have sued to regain the name.
This is parody.
If the local judges were likely to rule against them they should have relocated their corporate headquarters to a more judicially friendly venue, picked a new similar equally-"infringing" name, and pre-emptively sued to declare that their use was not a trademark infringement. Then once they won that battle, sue for the old name back.
My guess is they decided it wasn't worth the expense.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Cant afford to send a legal team to Sweden? Then you lose. Company I work for had their domain (and thus their company name) taken away, not because it was being misused or anything like that, but because we couldn't afford to go defend ourselves. Now if you go to the domain there's just a diatribe against us full of false claims and BS.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"And malicious sites can create havoc with a brand's reputation."
Apparently, proving this statement is left as an exercise for the reader.
In the US we're used to being able to parody anything without fear of copyright or trademark litigation issues. It's sad that the ICANN doesn't work the same way. It really should.
...
I think cybersquatting should become increasingly costly over time, with crowd ratings as the determining factor as to whether someone is in fact squatting. If, say, 85% of people say a domain is being squatted, then the squatter's registration fee should double each successive year.
Whether Lego -- which I generally perceive as far too litigious -- was right or wrong in its action against FreeLegoPorn.com, at least that was being used to host legitimate content. What really bugs me is domain owners who buy up a bunch of domain names to extort money out of those with a legitimate interest in them, or those who buy up a bunch of domain names for no other reason than to host advertising pages (which I consider a form of DNS spam).
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Surely they are only doing this so they can make more money? Cybersquatters must be a huge source of revenue for them.
ICANN needs to be replaced with something more non-for-profit and preferably international, because they're just taking the piss.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
Crap! Why didn't someone tell me!? Is this site now operating under a different name? I expect this is a very funny thing to see. Is there a mirror or cache or wayback or anything of this site?
First off, cybersquatting isn't new at all. Hasn't been an upsurge.
second, FreeLegoPorn.com wasn't cybersquatting. It's an artistic website creatively using lego's to make porn.
This story should be about how Freelegoporn got fucked over by they name register.
Be seeing you...
Now, ICANN is preparing to open a potentially unlimited number of new top-level domains as early as the first quarter of 2010.
Well, this should prove interesting, since the alt root I'm associated with (OpenNIC) hasn't received notification from ICANN as to how colliding TLDs will be handled. And I don't know of any other alternate roots that have been contacted either.
Why not? [link not safe for work]
IMO the idea of the domain name is so ten years ago. The explosion of TLDs makes it more so, as it's no longer possible to get true exclusivity on a term. In the age of Google and SEO, what matters is the number of inbound links, the naming of file names, and such. Not the domain name. I say this as someone who once made $10,000 by cyber-squatting on entegris.com back in the day (thank you Network Solutions and the ability to reserve a name 30 days before you paid for it or it just lapsed) .
According to netcraft in the last year there has been about 40% increase in fully qualified domain names out there (includes subdomains not just top level so not a perfect stat but a good indication)
June 2008 172,338,726 FQDNs (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2008/06/index.html)
June 2009 238,027,855 FQDNs (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/06/17/june_2009_web_server_survey.html)
So really you could say that cyber squatting is decreasing relative to the increase in domain names........
Not really increasing compared to domain names
Ah, but trademark rights do not protect against parody in the first place. You wouldn't even need to use a fair use defense, if you aren't using the trademark as a trademark on similar products then you aren't infringing the trademark rights.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Well, this should prove interesting, since the alt root I'm associated with (OpenNIC) hasn't received notification from ICANN as to how colliding TLDs will be handled. And I don't know of any other alternate roots that have been contacted either.
Why would they bother contacting the alt roots? They are separate name spaces, so there can be no collisions. Isn't that that whole point of the alt roots?
I can just see the /. effect on all the cache & archive servers as everyone tried to hit them to see the lost content.
Are you seriously suggesting that freelegoporn.com was NOT intended to be a money-making venture?
Eh? Who cares? Was Lego planning on getting into the porn business? No? Then I could market my 'Lego' brand of porn without infringing. Just like Apple Records and Apple Computers can coexist.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I honestly don't quite get the beef everyone has with cybersquatters. At least not the point where their legs should broken, etc...
Sure, they may not be making as good a use as you might, but why should that be the determination of who gets to take it away.
Now, if it is a site that is fraudulent, I can understand that, but that is a different allegation then cybersquatting. I can also understand trademark infringement (to some extent) but this whole "my brand is x so anyone with an x in their domain name should belong to me" seems a little over the top.
This is why every single person here should try everything in their power to stop ICANN from doing such stupid things.
Opening up the TLD system is just going to cause havoc for everyone.
If only URLs were back-to-front, like it SHOULD have been.
What idiot decided it would be a good idea to have the current system?
It should have been protocol://continent.country.siteType.domain.sub-domain1.sub-domainN/directories
SiteType being organization, museum, TV, government, xxx (if only, it would help a lot if it was more regulated) etc.
Doesn't it just seem so much nicer this way?
Instead, we have the current mess which makes it so much easier to do something like http://myspace.com.iwillstealyourshit.com/
Separate namespaces, but the alt roots try to be good citizens. Most alt roots (including OpenNIC) mirror the ICANN root as well. Several years ago, ICANN railroaded .biz through, even though OpenNIC had clear "first dibs" on the TLD. I assume more of the same is coming down the road.
If someone wanted to make money on this they could create a domain reg. service that registers all available tld's automatically, both as already owned tlds become available and as new tlds are introduced. I don't think the ICANN would be happy about it, but it would be valuable for corporations that want to protect their brand. Unless, that is, if ICANN creates a ".sucks" or ".iscrooked" tld. (http://apple.sucks) ...Profit !
There's a new, free typosquatting scan tool at aliasencore.com. It shows you all the registered .COM domain names that are one character misspellings of any Alexa top 100,000 site you enter. It also displays screenshots of those typosquatting sites. It's a nifty way to get a quick idea of the rampant growth of typosquatting (which is a subset of cybersquatting). Here's an example that shows the 431 registered .COM domain names that are one character away from google.com.
Full disclosure: I am Graham MacRobie, the CEO of Alias Encore, Inc. We help companies recover cybersquatting domain names, but we focus solely on "slam-dunk" typosquatting cases, not questionable cybersquatting cases such as the one mentioned in this article.
people see a market and grabbed up something they believed would be of value later. Big deal.
And ICANN shutting down that brick based porn cite is a shame. Completly outside the point of trademark and copyright. It was a blow to free speech.
I bunch of companies whining that they didn't have the foresight to get a domain and they get to just shut people down for the sole reason that they are a big company.
It's a shame.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I like it. But they'll just use shell companies or a list of fake domain "owners".
A big part of the problem is laziness - users seem to only remember the DNS part of the URL and treat the path name as forgettable. The web works fine even if your site is a subdirectory of a domain or a sub-domain (though there are specific technical differences). If more sites were content to exist in directories of a domain, it might even reduce DNS traffic on the web!!!
Another solution would be to require DNS registrants to link to legal trademark granted by their country, as in "www.trademark.countrycode". This has its own problems. One is that people equate domain registration with free speech, which again points to people's desire to have their "own" site (meaning their own DNS name) not understanding that it makes almost ZERO difference whether your site is in a subfolder or a seperate domain name. It's just another entry in the multi-homed apache config file to equate each of those domain to a path on the web server. A URL that's just a domain like www.skateboardcity.com just looks cleaner than us.angelfire.com/~bbart/skateboardcity/welcome.html
This desirability causes domain registration become a kind of security, like stocks or bonds, used for speculation instead of their real purpose: the worldwide dissemination of amusing kitten photos.
Cybersquatters are people/companies who grab domain names and then fail to use them for legitimate sites that match the domain name. If the Lego corporation grabs freelegoporn.com and fails to use it to host free Lego porn, then the Lego corporation is guilty of cybersquatting.
WHOIS:confirms. LEGO indeed now owns a domain advertising Lego Porn.
Next question: What are they going to use it for? :P
Unless Lego has gone into the porn business themselves (have they?), Lego is clearly in the wrong here; they had no right to shut down FreeLegoPorn.com What they should be "suffering" from is a serious lawsuit for abuse of trademark law.
i like parody, but it really doesn't belong in dot com
Green energy is a hot topic, so cybersquatters have been targeting wind and solar energy start-ups. And malicious sites can create havoc with a brand's reputation.
Startups, by definition, don't have a brand, or a reputation.
MarkMonitor should elicit the same kind of response in your brain as "Media Sentry".
Need Mercedes parts ?
... after the new TLDs are sold and name resolution turns to arbitrary mish-mash. Add to that the fantastic new spamming opportunities and just wait to see what a fantastic clusterfuck ICANN is about to unleash upon us. Why on earth we aren't storming the compound with torches and picks I don't know; once this goes down there is no undoing the damage.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Suffering? Lego and Verizon are the oppressors, as are any who claim "intellectual property rights" against innocent victims.
I don't think I have ever seen any of my kids' Legos having explicit sex.
And I somehow doubt that anyone else has ever seen this done between Legos... but if so, let's hope it is done between consenting Legos.
.
- aqk
F U
the World Intellectual Property Organization, which ruled in its favor
No shit? Who would have thought, that an organization, who names itself after something that does not exist, is 100% biased? ^^
On the other hand: Who are they, and how can they "rule" anything? Sure, they can all sit down, play important, and sing a scrap of paper. So what?
My answer would be, what the composer Brahms responded to a review of his latest symphony: "Dear sir: I am seated in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me, and very soon it will be behind me."
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.