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Posted by David Naffziger in ACPA, case law, typosquatting
29 Aug
In December, a court awarded Verizon a $33.5M default judgment against OnlineNIC for typosquatting on 683 domain names such as verizonphnes.com. OnlineNIC, based in China, never even showed up at court.
While it might seem that a judgment such as this would be impossible to collect, the source for nearly all cybersquatting revenue originates [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in ACPA, case law, cybersquatting, typosquatting
24 Dec
Verizon issued a press release today that announced a record $33.5M cybersquatting judgment against OnlineNIC. There were 663 domains in question and the judge chose to award $50K per domain, presumably under the guidelines of the Anti-Cybersquatting Protection Act (ACPA), which allow a penalty of between $1K and $100K per domain. Very little is known [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in ACPA, BrandVerity, PoachMark, PoachMark Pool, case law, poaching
19 Dec
We’re excited to announce the launch of the PoachMark Pool – a collaborative approach to catching trademark poachers. It allows you to benefit from the discoveries of other members.
What is the PoachMark Pool?
The PoachMark Pool is a shared resource of search ads contributed by PoachMark customers. All of the data we retrieve about a particular [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in ACPA, PPC, UDRP, cybersquatting, domains, poaching, typosquatting
13 Nov
My slides from the Domains and Trademark Issues panel at PubCon are here. I went through a number of tools that website owners can use to find abuse in domains and PPC.
Clarke Walton provided an overview of trademark law and a good case study involving pubcon.com Deborah Wilcox profiled the default judgment against Punch-Clock.com [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in ACPA, cybersquatting, domains
05 Nov
A lot of press has been generated over the last few weeks about Google’s AdSense for Domains programs and a potential class action suit that claims Google is assisting trademark violation. I’ve seen estimates that Google makes anywhere between several hundred million to a billion dollars from its domain parking program.
There are two reasons why [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in ACPA, case law, cybersquatting, domains, typosquatting
05 Aug
The US district court in southern California recently granted an injunction against Navigation Catalyst (nofollow) and their bulk registrar Basic Fusion (nofollow). Navigation Catalyst is definitely among the larger domain companies and had engaged in heavy ‘domain tasting’, the registration of domain names to test them for traffic.
This case is significant because it is the [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in ACPA, adwords, case law
24 Apr
Thomas O’Toole reviews a recent decision by the District Court in the Punch Clock v Smart Software Development case. The two websites in question (punchclock.com & punch-clock.com).
The case was won by default (the defendant didn’t appear). The defendant was found to have infringed the registered punchclock mark in violation of 15 U.S.C. 1114(1)(a) and had [...]
Sarah Bird at SEOMoz has an excellent post up on the differences between ACPA and UDRP. She touches on a few of the related issues of why someone might want to bring an ACPA suit instead of filing a UDRP.
If someone owns a domain that you feel infringes on your trademarks, I highly recommend reading [...]