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Story
Instead of hurling insults at the MacDonald Brothers, Simon Cowell should perhaps have been registering some obvious domain names for his X-Factor candidates.
Leona Lewis, who seems to be the favourite to win the X-Factor, is now the 'victim' of cybersquatters who have registered 'leonalewis.net' and tried to flog it on eBay.
According to Reuters, bidding wasn't exactly hot - with the top bid standing at £31. Experts (I'm not sure who) have said that this value could rise sharply. Unfortunately, when I visited the eBay listing I found that it had been withdrawn. Nice try, though.
It's not the first case of cybersquatting by a long way, and (no offence to Leona) there have been some much more famous cases (Tom Cruise for example).
"Celebrities' names become their brands and failing to secure all the obvious domain names has left this budding star open to attack online," said Jonathan Robinson of NetNames.
Lewis' page on social networking site MySpace has been visited more than 100,000 times.
I decided to do a bit of digging around other possible domain names (it's great fun. No, really). The name 'Ben Mills' is a fairly common name so I wasn't surprised to see quite legitimate sites in place for other people called Ben Mills (funny that).
Some people obviously have been taking domain names seriously, though: a certain Sony BMG Music Entertainment (UK) Ltd for example who registered nikittaangus.co.uk on 6th October 2006.
Interesting...
Instead of hurling insults at the MacDonald Brothers, Simon Cowell should perhaps have been registering some obvious domain names for his X-Factor candidates.
Leona Lewis, who seems to be the favourite to win the X-Factor, is now the 'victim' of cybersquatters who have registered 'leonalewis.net' and tried to flog it on eBay.
According to Reuters, bidding wasn't exactly hot - with the top bid standing at £31. Experts (I'm not sure who) have said that this value could rise sharply. Unfortunately, when I visited the eBay listing I found that it had been withdrawn. Nice try, though.
It's not the first case of cybersquatting by a long way, and (no offence to Leona) there have been some much more famous cases (Tom Cruise for example).
"Celebrities' names become their brands and failing to secure all the obvious domain names has left this budding star open to attack online," said Jonathan Robinson of NetNames.
Lewis' page on social networking site MySpace has been visited more than 100,000 times.
I decided to do a bit of digging around other possible domain names (it's great fun. No, really). The name 'Ben Mills' is a fairly common name so I wasn't surprised to see quite legitimate sites in place for other people called Ben Mills (funny that).
Some people obviously have been taking domain names seriously, though: a certain Sony BMG Music Entertainment (UK) Ltd for example who registered nikittaangus.co.uk on 6th October 2006.
Interesting...
