BrandVerity
 

We’re excited to announce that PoachMark has officially launched. With over 200 affiliate programs monitored, we’re confident that PoachMark meets the robustness standards that we’ve established internally for this milestone.
PoachMark is now monitoring the affiliate programs of top 5 e-commerce merchants and top 5 Internet advertisers along with niche online retailers. We think Stephen [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Cybersquatting class action

In June of 2007, a group of plaintiffs filed a class-action cybersquatting lawsuit against domain parking companies and Google (for providing the ads to the domain parking companies). As Eric Goldman states in his initial 07 analysis “I believe this is the first lawsuit against Google for its domainer relationships.”
The case moved forward slightly last [...]