Will It Be a Legal Problem to Hold Exact Match .com Domains of Upcoming Movies ?

[jyna]

Recently found some one in other forum Selling Exact Match Upcoming Movies Domains " few are .coms and few are .net domains.

These movies will be gone to release at the mid of this Year. Just want to know is there any legal problem too hold such domains ?

[silentg]

It's not worth the risk. Movie companies usually register hyphenated domain and promote that so there's no point in buying these names unless you're going to create a fan site with no ads.

UDRP cases with movie domains:
http://www.udrpsearch.com/search?que...&search=domain

[Maxwell]

Do not consider anything in this posting to be legal advice. I am not a lawyer. The opinions contained herein are unqualified and should be construed as just what they are; an opinion.

I've found the same thing. Movie domains are usually lousy, often hyphenated and/or in an inferior TLD such as .net.

The URL for "The Social Network" is the best one I've ever seen (www.500millionfriends.com).

To answer your question, it depends on how you can defend your ownership of the name. A URL such as 500millionfriends.com could mean anything. At no point have you said "facebook movie" or anything similar that might be infringing on any marks.

That is the primary question you have to ask yourself. For example, you'll have a much more difficult time defending ownership of a string of keywords such as, say, shrek4movie, since there is very little else it can mean.

Whereas waroftheworlds, 40yearoldvirgin, highschoolmusical, and weddingcrashers would be much easier names to justify, since, there's perfectly reasonable uses for those words that you can exercise within your right to free expression.

The second question you must ask yourself is, is it worth it?

An example of this was with the movie that came out recently called "Bucky Larson". They used buckylarson.com.

To see just how astute their web people were, I looked up buckylarsen.com, a very plausible misspelling of the name.

It was available for registration, but I would never touch anything such as this, given the rather unique name that I'd have a hard time explaining if brought before an arbitration panel.

Weeks later, it was taken, and redirected to an adult site (as of a check of mine conducted two minutes ago, still does). Which probably receives a respectable quantity of traffic, and in turn, revenue.

Even if I was ballsy enough to register this name, I simply don't think it would be worth it. Not just to register, but to fight to keep in my possession. This is for two reasons...

1. The period of time for which movies are promoted is very limited (maybe three to four months, prior to the release and while it's in theaters), so the chances you'll have to reap traffic from mistypes of the name and/or inaccurate guesses will be within a very short window of about 100 days, assuming you register it on the first day the movie (website and all) gets announced to the public.

This is not to say that movies are not sought out after they leave theaters, but advertising which displays the URL will not be present, so the person who is inclined to find information on the movie won't be typing it in off of memory from a movie poster (since there is no movie poster), but rather, googling it. And I wish you good luck in beating IMDB on the search engine rankings.

2. Your only chance to earn revenue will be off of PPC. They won't buy it off of you. Even if they were, it would be for no sizeable amount. If the domain in question is so obviously relevant to the movie at hand, they'd have taken the lack of domain on their part into consideration before pumping out millions of dollars worth of ads to the public. Which could very well consist of legal action against the owner of the domain, if it's that obvious.

That said, they won't buy it. So your only door which will let revenue in is pay-per-click ads. The only ones that will earn any money are the ones relating to the movie that people were expecting to find in the first place. Showing such ads will surely lose you the name, since there is too much coincidence between the keywords within the domain and the relevant ads which you have chosen to display by causing it to resolve to such a page.

Never mind losing the name, the ensuing litigation could cost you up to $100,000 per offending domain, plus any revenue you've earned as a result of owning it, under US law.

So, making my point, I would say that owning such names is not anything I would put any money, time, or effort towards. Simply not worth it and asking for trouble.

[Mark Talbot]

Plus most movie houses register the name,... "nameofmovie", followed by "movie.com".

They dont play with buying the name from a squatter, they reg as I described, then UDRP for the dot com represented.

[Cartoonz]

I'm surprised nobody has brought up the fact that titles of individual products like a movie are generally not eligible for trademark protection.

Only a series of products from a single source, such as sequels or a television series such as Bonanza, can be protected under trademark law. However, for a one-shot project like a movie, the title would not be protected by TM.

Now, this does not mean its risk free, but using a few of the examples above:
40yearoldvirgin.com, BuckyLarson.com, > not a series, not a TM

---------- Post added at 02:04 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:53 AM ----------

WarOfTheWorlds.com?

StarWars.com, HighSchoolMusical.com, The Munsters.com, twoandahalfmen.com <<< Protected, reg these and you're screwed.

Now... even for the one-off titles, anybody can sue anybody in this world, so you're always risking having to defend... and you still could lose.

[RTM.net]

Kudos to all responders in this thread, but particularly Maxwell for that spot-on analysis.

Rob

[STEPHAN]

Just on a side note: I once owned a Madagascar ccTLD long BEFORE the movie. Made nice money on parking BEFORE.
When the movie came out, the page went crazy for a few days. Then the producers complained to Google and till today I have not gotten the page back in regular parking.
Keep that in mind for your calculations.