It looks like two of our cli­ents may come to blows over a case of cyber­squat­ting which came to our atten­tion last week.

Here’s what tran­spired (the client’s names and URLs are not given out for obvi­ous reasons):

• Dir­ector A of cli­ent com­pany A Ltd leaves the com­pany under a bit of a cloud.
• After a few months, Dir­ector A sets up in busi­ness again offer­ing sim­ilar ser­vices to com­pany A Ltd and as such becomes a com­pet­itor to them.
• iNet Engin­eers con­tin­ues to man­age the web­sites and hosting/email accounts of com­pany A Ltd and Dir­ector A in his new busi­ness (but not their domain names).
• In time, the domain name of A Ltd approaches its renewal, how­ever due to an over­sight, it expires, goes into redemp­tion and even­tu­ally becomes free for regis­tra­tion again.
• Dir­ector A imme­di­at­ley re-registers the domain name pre­vi­ously owned by his former com­pany A Ltd, in his own name and tries to sell it back to them at an inflated price.
• Com­pany A Ltd decline and ask us for advice. They are not very happy as you can imagine.

Here’s what we said:

In situ­ations like this there’s prob­ably a case of “cyber­squat­ting” to be had by Dir­ector A. Cyber­squat­ting is where an indi­vidual or organ­isa­tion know­ingly registers the domain of another com­pany or brand owner with the inten­tion of either selling it back to them for a large profit or profi­ter­ing from its use for their own ends: i.e. they cap­it­al­ise upon someone elses intel­lec­tual prop­erty (IP) or brand val­ues without permission.

There have been many cases over the last few years where “cyber­squat­ters” have ended up in court and lost. Two of the most not­able cases in recent include the use of Tolkein’s name and that of Rob­bie Wil­li­ams.

In the case of our two cli­ents above, we don’t man­age either cli­ents’ domains and as such, I felt it was not really our pos­i­tion to take a stand either way; so I sug­ges­ted that com­pany A Ltd con­tact Nom­inet, the con­trolling body for .co.uk domain names: and take a look at their Dis­pute Res­ol­u­tion Ser­vice (DRS) in an attempt to resolve the situation.

My per­sonal opin­ion is that Dir­ector A is on shaky ground leg­ally and that he could end up cre­at­ing a load of hassle for him­self for very little or no return. Still we’ll see.

Other Posts Sim­ilar To This One

• Time To Lib­er­ate the Web
• Grab Your Twit­ter Name before Someone Else Does
• What’s in a Name? Choose Your Domain Name Wisely