Posted by shaunpud 4 hours ago
Around 1998 I registered a domain. Sony registered a trademark with the same name a few years after that. Someone on a Gmail account asked if he could buy it - I later found out he worked for Sony. I told him no - it's for a game I've been working on. I went on a vacation for a month and when I got back there was a fedex package filled with documents from Sony saying I'm violating their trademark and they'll take the domain.
I got a lawyer and he told me that I shouldn't offer it for sale as that would show the arbitration board that I don't need the domain. But he also told me that in order to fight the trademark it would probably cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars. So I could keep the domain but not use it for commerce...
In the end I ended up selling it to Sony but through my lawyer - I never stated it was for sale. But this was early on for domains and I wonder what the process is like now.
UDRP:
https://www.icann.org/en/contracted-parties/consensus-polici...
Look for interesting sounding domain names that are owned but not being used by individuals.
Create a product with the same name.
Sue the person with the domain name and take it from them.
Win, because you're big.
Archive.org it to see little man beating big corporation
> In compliance with a ruling issued by the United States District Court in Los Angeles on November 14, 2002, in the lawsuit of Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. v. Nissan Computer Corporation, this web site has been converted to non-commercial use.
And then this https://web.archive.org/web/20050701005403/http://www.nissan... says:
> Nissan Motor is suing Nissan Computer (named after its founder and current President, Mr. Uzi Nissan) for Trademark Infringement, Trademark Dilution and CyberSquatting, seeking 10 Million Dollars in damages
Besides this also indicate not so "little man".
>If you're offering it for sale, you're clearly not using it for commerce. [...]
>if you're selling a domain and someone has a trademark for it, you should have to hand it over. Hell, I'd argue that should apply even without a trademark [...]
I disagree, but they made a point and did so clearly.
Why that person felt someone else's chosen commercial use of a domain should trump anyone's non-commercial (or less commercial) use, I don't know.
All business assets are for sale at the right price, right? Even whilst living by the business at a particular domain, I'd have sold that domain for £200k, probably a lot less. Same as for any business asset, even (especially?) those in commercial use.
It's like concert tickets or any other limited resource that is transferable, "society" generally wants most people to have access to them but if they're too cheap then it's easy for one rich person to just buy them all.
Anyways, domain names are perhaps less limited these days (and google/claude kind of remove user's direct interaction anyways) if the usage of non-dotcoms are anything to go by. Also it's super hard to distinguish personal private use vs squatting.
Does publicly listing a domain for sale mean you'd automatically lose a UDRP arbitration if someone has a trademark for it?
No. A public sale listing is not an automatic loss. Here's how panels actually decide these cases.
The controlling rule
Bad faith based on a sale offer requires that the domain was registered primarily for the purpose of selling to the trademark owner (or a competitor) for more than out-of-pocket costs. Two things must be true at once: (1) the primary purpose of registration was to sell, and (2) the target was that specific trademark holder. A generic public listing on Sedo or Afternic doesn't automatically satisfy either requirement. (WIPO Overview 3.1; UDRP Perspectives 3.5)
What panels actually look at
No single factor decides it. Panels weigh all of these:
How distinctive is the trademark? A coined word like KODAK is treated very differently from a generic term like CLOUD.
Did the registrant plausibly know about the mark when registering? Famous marks raise this inference; obscure marks don't.
Was the offer directed at the trademark owner specifically, or listed publicly for any buyer?
Does the asking price only make sense if the trademark owner is the buyer, or is it consistent with general market prices?
Does the registrant hold a broader portfolio of generic/descriptive domains, or a collection of brand-matching ones?
Was the domain registered after the mark became well-known, or before?
Is there a credible non-trademark reason to want the domain?
Things that do NOT automatically mean bad faith
Listing a domain publicly for sale (UDRP Perspectives 3.5)
Asking a high price (UDRP Perspectives 3.5; WIPO Overview 3.1.1)
Even reaching out to the trademark owner directly — panels look at whether multiple parties were approached and whether the registration was brand-specific (UDRP Perspectives 3.5)
Wanting to profit — legitimate domain investing is a recognized lawful activity under UDRP (UDRP Perspectives 2.6)
When the calculus shifts against you
The harder cases are where the domain is identical to a highly distinctive coined brand, there's no plausible use for the domain other than trading on the trademark, and the asking price is only realistic for the trademark owner itself. In those cases panels have found bad faith even without a direct approach to the owner. A notable example is the three-member panel majority in WIPO case D2022-1570, which found that the asking price implied the complainant was the only conceivable buyer — though a dissent disagreed, illustrating that even these edge cases are not automatic.
Bottom line
The outcome depends on: how famous and distinctive the mark is, whether you had it in your sights at registration, whether there's a credible independent reason to want the domain, and who you're actually marketing it to. Generic terms with multiple plausible buyers, listed publicly, have repeatedly survived UDRP challenges. (UDRP Perspectives 3.5) Coined-brand matches with sky-high asking prices and no other credible use have not.
"The registrar must provide the full Registration Data to the UDRP provider within two business days after the registrar is notified that a UDRP complaint exists. The registrar must also lock the domain."
If you're offering it for sale, you're clearly not using it for commerce. I'm sure if you finished you game and offered it for sale on that domain, you'd be fine. You're actually using it and in a non-infringing way.
So yes, if you're selling a domain and someone has a trademark for it, you should have to hand it over. Hell, I'd argue that should apply even without a trademark, but alas...
Twitter owned both the domain and all trademarks so it’s a non issue.
Basically in fairly limited circumstances you can have your domain taken off you if someone else holds a matching trademark. Saying you are selling it can go some way to demonstrating you are not holding it in good faith.
I now get what you're saying, but then this can be turned against everyday people. Imagine you have a domain that is your personal blog, vacation photos, stuff like that. No ads, nothing to sell there. Then you receive a message "We from Microsoft/Sony/IBM/Amazon are willing to give you 10Mil for this domain, because we have plans for it, if you won't use it for something bigger ofc" And then show your reply in court saying "He want to sell it". Even if you run a successful business, they can troll you and say "We offer 1bil - you and your family will not have to work for the rest of your life", and then say "His business is fake, he is selling the domain". I don't know if this is possible but if it is, then the whole system is wrong I guess.
Since most domains that are for sale don't currently have such a record, it would be wrong to assume they are not for sale. Therefore, absence of such a record does not explicitly mean "not for sale." It's no different from a house: a "for sale" sign in the front yard means it's for sale, but lack of a sign doesn't mean it's not for sale; it could mean the owner doesn't wish to advertise that way, or at all.
I have a domain name with the TLD of "today". Many people think my email is [email]@[domain].today.com. It's not just the common person's fault but also software engineers / product managers who still have a very restrictive view of what a TLD is (under 3 three letters is the primary restriction I hit).
Since I don't believe we'll ever convince people that domains longer than 3 letters / full words are TLDs, I think the solution is every human being gets 10 domain names at marketprice then every domain ownership above that gets graduated ownership costs; the first year is market, second year is $100, third year is $500, fourth year is $1,000, and so on until the 10th year where it levels out at $10k per year.
The idea of it being if you want to hold onto a lot of domains you need to pay for it or make the domains economically viable. With what is essentially infinite space, we shouldn't be allowing domains to be like finite real world real estate to be speculated on.
1. People who can't understand how tld works, learn it. Changing the world to accomodate ignorance is not my preferred direction.
2. We don't link the concept of domain names to economically viable for an US citizen, since that is not a fair for probably a few billion other people.
I think this solves none of the current problems with domain names, but at least it does not add any new ones.
I don't like the pollution of the global namespace. If someone thinks, there should be a domain named today, fine, but don't put it in the global namespace by creating a new TLD. DNS is a hierarchical structure, there is no reason domains should all be only 4 segments long. Arguable 'com.' should have really been 'com.us.', but that's history.
Domain names are still a finite space, given that a full domain name can be at most 253 characters, and each domain label at most 63 characters. “Requiring” a .com/.org/.net/.CC at the end isn’t really that much of a restriction.
By the way, madamelic.com appears to be available.
> By the way, madamelic.com appears to be available.
Hmmm! I may have to grab this one. The one I really want is madeline.com (it's owned by the family who made Madeline the book) but I am doubtful I will ever get that one without loads of money or ever, hah.
I am hesitant to say the domain because of spammers but it is the [shortened version of that name].today.
I’m more annoyed by products/companies choosing names that are just common words.
I'd argue that they're not freeform now. You need to pay ICANN something like 250k USD to consider your application for a new TLD, plus I think you need to convince them that you actually can operate the infrastructure required to reliably serve queries and subdomain registrations for that TLD.
I do agree that we have _way_ more TLDs now than the five or ten we had back in the 1990s, but the barrier to creating a new one is so large that I'd not describe them as "freeform".
In my opinion domain squatting should be banned instead.
When searching their online whois[1], they'll tell you if a domain is for sale and link to the for sale page. They don't use any of the info you put in the DNS though. The URL comes from their internal system. You need to register it separately. They also don't use the price, txt or anything else you put in the DNS.
All they use is the "fcod", to look up the url in their own system. They had a different syntax for this before, but this functionality has existed for some years.