Cyber Squatting

Booner!

Booner!

Booner!

Soldato
Joined
29 Sep 2005
Posts
9,128
My company owns trademarks and registration for the name of the company, it's quite large now (Turnover of £27million) and we own lots of IP in the forms of domain names and several online operations.

However, the one we want www.example.com is registered to some nobody who has some rubbish website up (rubbish being a white page with a paragraph and some links) which hasn't been updated since 1996.

He is holding on to it and we loose lots and lots of referals because we have to use NAMEuk.com. We are willing to pay to get an official .com, but this guy now knows it is worth something to us... and want £50,000+ for the name.

Can this be defined as Cyber Squatting? What can we do about this?
 
Surely it comes up for renewal? or there is some other way or legally stopping him from doing this? I thought that it must have a purpose, but this guy is just wasting a good domain name in order to try make a stupid amount of money.
 
Just because your a company it doesn't mean you are suddenly more empowered than an individual.

It's his property and he can do as he wishes with it, respect that.
 
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tbh good for him... :p

end of the day he got it first... he owns it and can ask he wishes especially if a successful company comes on the scene?

i would be doing the same...
 
It's a simple question of Maths, will your company get an extra 50k+ worth of business from owning the .com address if so buy it if not don't bother. The only other alternative is to ask him if you could rent some space on his homepage and put you company logo with a paragraph saying if you were looking for us click here or something similar. This isn't uncommon for example www .feeder. com (dodogy dodgy site not work suitabl etc) has a link to www.feederweb.comfor the band.
 
a1ex2001 said:
It's a simple question of Maths, will your company get an extra 50k+ worth of business from owning the .com address if so buy it if not don't bother. The only other alternative is to ask him if you could rent some space on his homepage and put you company logo with a paragraph saying if you were looking for us click here or something similar. This isn't uncommon for example www .feeder. com (dodogy dodgy site not work suitabl etc) has a link to www.feederweb.comfor the band.
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www.feeder.com is a news site mate!
 
You would only really have a case to go to court if you could prove he was holding onto it just to get some money out of you. No chance of this im afraid bearing in mind he has had it since at least from 1996. Looks like you either have to pay up or look at other domain names.
 
Booner! said:
We know we will get extra business, but to justify £50,000 out of profits versus the return is quite difficult.
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surely not, if you know that your going to get more business then you can quantify it and you should know your profit margins etc so it should be quite quick and smiple to work out how long it would take to make the money back.

50K is actually pretty reasonable in my opinion, he has something you want he's set what seems a reasonable valuation and it's down to you MD to cough up the asking price, make him and ofer he can't refuse or acept he's not getting his top level domain name.
 
Booner! said:
Surely it comes up for renewal? or there is some other way or legally stopping him from doing this? I thought that it must have a purpose, but this guy is just wasting a good domain name in order to try make a stupid amount of money.
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That is his choice and one you can't stop. He owns it, therefore he can do whatever he likes with it.

If you wish to purchase it from him then you come to an agreement with him. You don't weasel around it trying to steal it from him in some legal-but-morally-objectionable way.

chesterstu said:
It's a mute point anyway if the country the domain holder is in is different to that the trademark is registered in
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Moot :)
a1ex2001 said:
oh maybe it's the .co.uk variant or maybe it's changed it used to be a website about ladies who eat far to much and don't wear much clothing really not very plesant!
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It wouldn't be clever putting it on the forum if that was the case, whether direct linking to it or not.
 
Well I am just saying that I cannot see how it would bring us extra revenue, but it would make us feel like a larger company and tick the box to say we have a proper .com. We have .co.uk and our new sales website has .com aswell, but the main site is still companyUK.COM.

Obviously we have bought typo's and all sorts, this is the last one we need. It's like collecting shiney football stickers as a child and the last one to complete the collection is this .com :D
 
If you take your case to ICANN you might actually be able to get them to force domain transfer, it's happened before in cases where people have registered domains (eg www.microsoft.com) for the sole reason of selling to make a profit. However, if he registered it a long time ago and uses it for whatever personal use, there's nothing you can do.
 
platypus said:
If you take your case to ICANN you might actually be able to get them to force domain transfer, it's happened before in cases where people have registered domains (eg www.microsoft.com) for the sole reason of selling to make a profit. However, if he registered it a long time ago and uses it for whatever personal use, there's nothing you can do.
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The same thing happened to a small company who owned bbc.com , boston something or other corp. They were forced to hand it over to the bbc.

R

Mehul
 
So whilst you're complaining about this guy holding onto his domain you're also buying up any domain that's a bit like the one you use for your business? Hypocrite tbh :p
 
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