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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.
Unfortunately that won't stop people trying to take it off you if they want it. I get occasional offers/demands for some of my domains, for example.
It helps to be outside the US, then you can just ignore 99% of the legal threats. Make sure to avoid using a US based domain registrar, so that US courts can't force them to hand the domain over with a default judgement. Make sure you never hint at or imply you might be willing to sell. Sometimes they will offer you insane amounts of money in the hope you will bite, but it's a trap. Once you express interest they will claim you are cybersquatting and try to use the dispute resolution system to take control.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I was involved in one case where a big company wanted to buy a domain name. The domain owner had done a number of things right -- posted real content about his business on it, and number of things wrong -- indicated that the domain was for sale.
The corporate lawyer looked into the situation and thought that they could win the rights to the domain in court. However, reasonably enough the lawyer indicated that it would probably cost more than it would take to just buy the domain. At the end of the day, the company agreed to pay up to $10,000 for the domain (the owner settled for about $7,000).
The lawyer's reasoning was that the fight would be messy, maybe cost more than $10,000 (in effort and time) and might lose. Also, the potential for bad publicity and pissing off the community didn't make business sense.
The system sort of worked. In the end, everyone got what they wanted. The domain owner got a reasonable payout without too much effort (switching his domain wasn't that hard, and the corporation agreed to forward the email for six months or longer if needed), the company got the domain it wanted, no one got pissed off and no animals were injured.
Sometimes things work out for the better.
Hold your horses. Hinting that you're willing to sell is probably the worst possible thing you can do if a trademark owner is trying to take your domain away from you. From ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, the first example of a bad faith registration is: " circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name."
Never signal that you're willing to sell, even as a joke. The domain is your baby, and you want it forever. If they offer an amount you're willing to sell for, then take it. But never admit before then that a certain amount would get you to change your mind. When Nissan (the car company) tried to take nissan.com from Uzi Nissan (the computer store owner) who had registered the domain long before Datsun ever began using their Nissan trademark in the U.S., they asked him how much it would take for him to sell. He replied, "A million dollars. Why can't you understand I'm not going to sell." Basically he pulled a Dr. Evil. Back when the phrase "a million dollars" was first coined and the average person made a few dollars a week, it meant a ridiculously huge sum of money. But today it's not that much money.
Nissan's lawyers immediately took the first half of his statement, snipped out the context in the second half, and presented it to ICANN as evidence he was squatting the domain to extort money from the trademark owner. ICANN then decided to take the domain away from him and put it in escrow until the dispute was resolved (eventually in Uzi Nissan's favor years later, though he lost millions because he wasn't awarded legal fees). If he hadn't used that particular phrase, he might have been able to continue using the domain throughout the legal proceedings.
Read up on the UNDRP if this is something you're really worried about.