Market Evaluation

Trademarks

GoldNames strongly discourages investing in names that are trademark violations, e.g., amazontextbooks.com, or violations of an individual's right to his or her own name, e.g., annlanders.com. Investing in these names is unethical (because it is taking advantage of another's intellectual property) and probably unprofitable (because of the legal battles it will create, which the name speculator in the situation is likely to lose).

Some people, known as "cybersquatters," have tried to make large amounts of money by registering Web addresses using the trademarks of famous companies, in hopes of later forcing the companies to pay sizable amounts of money to buy the rights to the Internet locations.

Today, all registrars in the .com, .net, and .org generic Top-Level Domains follow the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (often referred to as the "UDRP"). Under the policy, most types of trademark-based domain-name disputes must be resolved by agreement, court action, or arbitration before a registrar will cancel, suspend, or transfer a domain name. Disputes alleged to arise from abusive registrations of domain names (for example, cybersquatting) may be addressed by expedited administrative proceedings that the holder of trademark rights initiates by filing a complaint with an approved dispute-resolution service provider.

To invoke the policy, a trademark owner should either (a) file a complaint in a court of proper jurisdiction against the domain-name holder (or where appropriate an in-rem action concerning the domain name) or (b) in cases of abusive registration submit a complaint to an approved dispute-resolution service provider.

Under the UDRP, an arbitrator can readily rip away a domain name from a "cybersquatter" who has registered a valuable trademark as his own. Plaintiffs from PaineWebber to Panavision have won domain-related trademark battles in court.

In the last quarter of 1999, congress worked vigorously to regulate cybersquatting and cyberpiracy with the passage of four landmark acts: The Domain Name Piracy Prevention Act of 1999, The Anitcybersquatting Consumer Protection Act , The Trademark Cyberpiracy Protection Act and the Satellite Viewers Act. This legislation allows trademark owners to recover statutory damages in cases where it is proven that a trademarked name was registered in bad faith by a person who intended to unfairly profit from its sale.

Major corporations today are sometimes willing to pay a small amount to a squatter to avoid the expense of a lawsuit. However, the courts have generally been very sympathetic to their ownership rights to domain names which are similar to their registered trademarks.