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Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Hold Onto Your Domain?
An anonymous reader writes: There have been quite a few stories recently about corporations, or other people, wanting to take over a domain. This has me wondering what steps can I take to ensure that outsiders know that my domain is in use, and not up for sale. In my case, I registered a really short domain name(only 5 characters) for a word that I made up. The domain has been mine for a while, and Archive.org has snapshots going back to 2001 of my placeholder page. It could be close to other domain names by adding one more letter, so there is potential for accusations of typosquatting (none yet). I have no trademark on the word, because I saw no reason to get one. The domain is used mostly for personal email, with some old web content left out there for search engines to find. The hosting I pay for is a very basic plan, and I can't really afford to pay for a ton of new traffic. There is the option to set up a blog, but then it has to be maintained for security. What would other readers suggest to establish the domain as mine, without ramping up the amount of traffic on it?
If you read the article, you'd see he said he was using it for email.
That's not cybersquatting. Just because it doesn't have a webserver it does not mean it's not being used.
This has me wondering what steps can I take to ensure that outsiders know that my domain is in use, and not up for sale.
Probably using the domain, and not putting it up for sale would be a good start.
Not all domains are used for public websites. Is this a real problem, or is your domain likely to be confused for a prominent brand? I have domains I've registered but never got round to the project they were intended for, but I don't worry that I have to justify their existence to anyone beyond paying the registration fee.
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
You've had a domain for 14 years. You haven't abused it. You have real email traffic and some real website on it. You aren't even in the grey. I would say don't worry about it. Just don't let the domain expire.
The unfortunate fact is that it really doesn't matter if you establish prior use of the domain, because arguments of this sort only arise when there's an external trademark that already has multiple millions of dollars of "goodwill" competing for the use of the domain. The typical timeline for this sort of thing is: Joe Public registers boo.com because his daughter's nickname is Boo and he wants a cool place for showing off her baby pictures. 10 years later, someone builds the persona of their dog Boo into a huge franchise, and decides that they want an internet persona. They file to push Joe Public off the domain. Because they NOW have a huge investment in "boo", they beat Joe Public's use of the term even though, had they had a trademark battle initially, he would have won through prior ownership. And it's expensive to fight these battles. I own a three-letter domain name, which I've had since the mid 1990s. Yes, I've owned this domain for 20+ years. I have had to fight off - fortunately at no great cost - a couple of people who wanted to use business names that had the same acronym as my domain. I'm getting sort of tired of it to be honest - three letter .com domains can fetch as much as $100K in the right markets, and I'd seriously consider an offer like that at this point, despite a huge load of my life being linked to that site.
Which is it: a word you made up, or a well known domain name minus a letter?
It could be both... and even if it is the latter, that doesn't necessarily mean the domain was registered in "bad faith," which is a legal standard for cybersquatting. Are you suggesting that trademarks should extend not only to an actual trademarked name, but to all conceivable misspellings or abbreviated versions, etc.? That's not the legal standard... nor should it be. Trademarks are already a fairly broad restriction on public freedom, and they should only be extended beyond the actual name when there's an intent to deceive or to profit by confusion with the "real" name.
Because using duck typing, I say you're probably a cybersquatter, and don't deserve help.
Why? He's a guy who has had a domain for 14 years, appears to actually use it for something, and apparently any connection to a real world trademark is either so tenuous that no action has been taken so far or the trademarked name actually postdates his website, so the threat to his private website is new.
In any case, it sounds to me that it's more likely the poster is a typical Slashdot paranoid... worried about a threat that probably isn't significant.