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We were honored to be nominated for the Semmy Award for best PPC post of 2008 for our post on Search Engine PPC Trademark policies.
Our thanks and gratitude to the nominating committee!
ICANN had been planning on a radical transformation of the gTLD system in May 2009 that would result in a tremendous expansion of available gTLDs (current examples of gTLDs include .biz, .mobi, .com, .org). The proposal would basically allow anyone with $185K to buy a new gTLD (although technically those are application fees).
Large brands [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in case law, domains, typosquatting
19 Dec
In the Vulcan Golf vs. Google case, the judge recently denied a motion by the plaintiffs to turn the lawsuit into a class action. We’ve mentioned the lawsuit before, but the general gist is that the plaintiffs are alleging that Google and several other parties participate in trademark infringement by selling ads on infringing [...]
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 [...]
Techcrunch reports that CitizenHawk recently raised a $3M round.
CitizenHawk sells its services in two ways:
You can purchase their typosquatter identification tools and manage the recovery process yourself.
They acquire domains for free as long as you allow them to be an affiliate for 2 years.
We feel that this is great validation of the pain in the [...]
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 [...]
While this scam has been occurring for nearly 6 months, the scammers seem to have stepped up their efforts recently.
The recipient receives an email like this:
Dear CEO,
We are the domain name registration organization in China,which mainly deal with international company’s in china.We have something important need to confirm with your company.For now Saqi company [...]
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 [...]