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 couple of pages set up for people to list domain names for sale. Surprisingly, but I suppose not so surprisingly, I have received at least one submission with Pokemon-related domain names. Not smart if you ask me.
I would not guess how likely a UDRP or lawsuit would be, but I would imagine the vast majority of these domain names are worth absolutely nothing to anyone. This means any risk at all outweighs any potential reward.
As Pokemon Go continues to grow in popularity and awareness, I think people will continue trying to find a way to make money from the game. Buying Pokemon or other Nintendo trademark domain names is always a bad idea.
Nintendo owned hundreds of such domains and they have been dropping them the past months…
Nuno
I really don’t understand that, why dropping hundreds of domains with characters names immediately before releasing the game… They could have at least waited another year.
Nuno
I have seen a big spike in my augmented reality or ar inquiry emails to buy since the game released a great start for a new technology that will only grow
An alternative in naming would be “poke” or “pogo”, so no worries with pokestatus.com or pogodown.com.