What's in a name?

[Rockefeller]

Cybersquatting is an old problem that has come back to haunt business in a new form. Laws passed in 1999 were meant to stamp out the practice, whereby enterprising individuals would register trademarked names such as burgerking.com and virgin.com and sell them back to the trademark owners for extortionate sums.

Cybersquatting did not go away, however. Cybersquatters have just become smarter, says Anthony Gold, intellectual property lawyer at Eversheds, and are finding new ways to get around the laws.

For example, cybersquatters can cover their tracks by using privacy services that hide the details of who owns a website.

This makes suing them more complicated. In a lawsuit launched last August, Microsoft had to get court subpoenas to discover the owners of 217 websites it claimed were infringing its trademark.

Some are taking advantage of the sheer volume of new domain names on offer, as new "top-level domains" such as .mobi, .eu and .asia, come into existence alongside the old favourites .com and .net.


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[Banned: NYdomainer]

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