According to a blog post on Facebook’s corporate blog, the social network company filed a lawsuit against Namecheap. The suit was filed because there were domain names registered at Namecheap under Whois privacy proxy that allegedly infringed on Facebook’s trademarks. The blog post was written by Christen Dubois, Director and Associate General Counsel, IP Litigation at Facebook.
Here’s an excerpt from the blog post outlining the lawsuit:
This week, Google announced a new gaming platform called Stadia. As I observed shortly after the news was announced, Google smartly acquired the brand match Stadia.com domain name in advance of the announcement. I did not notice other Stadia-related domain names registered by Google at the time I wrote my article, but the company appears to have registered many domain names in ccTLD and new gTLD extensions in the hours and days since. Ten of the Stadia domain names registered by Google (via DNStination Inc.) include:
According to Verisign’s DomainView Tool, nearly 4,000 .com and .net domain names have been registered with the Pokemon trademark in them during the past 7 days. This includes 421 .net domain names and 3,447 .com domain names. I am sure there have been hundreds or possibly thousands of other Pokemon-related domain names registered in ccTLDs and new gTLD domain names during the same time period.
Although some of these domain names may potentially be used legitimately, many of them are risky to own. I think Nintendo could file UDRP proceedings or potentially file a massive cybersquatting lawsuit if they wished. I have no idea what the company’s tolerance level is for domain names with their trademarks, but I think it is very risky for people to buy domain names with trademarks like this. Keep in mind that I am not a lawyer of course.
I am always looking to buy domain names and have a
Whenever there is something viral or trending, it seems that people register a ton of domain names to try and capitalize on the trend or participate in it in a unique way.
If you’ve been watching the news for the last few days (or are into gaming), you’ve probably heard about Pokemon Go. If you haven’t, CNN published an article about it yesterday.
As with other trends, it seems that people are trying
When Verisign released its list of “Top 10 Trending Keywords in .Com & .Net Registrations in October,” I was surprised to see that “Nike” was one of the trending keywords. This month, another popular and well known brand is on the list for .Net registrations.
Here’s a tweet from Verisign announcing the monthly list, along with a blog post that shares more information about the monthly trend list:
New on the blog: November's top 10 trending keywords in .com & .net registrations https://t.co/pS4yhq2Jiu
— VERISIGN (@VERISIGN) December 8, 2015
I don’t see
In an unsurprising UDRP decision, the Bloomberg.Market domain name has been awarded to Bloomberg Finance. As you may recall, a website was set up on Bloomberg.Market to look like the actual Bloomberg website and an unfounded news report was published. The result was a giant temporary fluctuation in the price of Twitter stock.
The UDRP decision was published by the World Intellectual Property Organization, and it can be found on the UDRPSearch.com website. There was one panelist presiding over this UDRP decision, and not surprisingly, the respondent did not issue a response to the complaint.
You can read the entire UDRP decision for yourself if you would like, but here are a couple of interesting tidbits I found: