Know domain infringement disputes

What is Domain Trademark Infringement?
Domain infringement or cyber squatting is a situation when someone register a domain name that more looks like the registered trademark of a firm or organization. In reality the above situation becomes so complicated that sometimes it becomes impossible to say about infringement. Whenever a company launch a new product or new firm is ventured people exploit this situation and register the domain name that may be needed by company for branding. One obvious reason why they do it to sell it for higher price and some other people use it as brand name and sell their own products under this.

When the domain is disputed
In case your owned domain name that is the registered trademark of a company or brand name of any future product then you may be sued if you can not provide enough evidence about the intension behind registering it.

Whenever any domain dispute occurs the complainant generally approach to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and then WIPO sends notification to the registrar of disputed domain by email to get the contact information of the person who owns the domain subsequently the domain owner will be contacted and instructed to follow up with the case. Each year WIPO is bombarded with the thousands of complains which are handled by under the law of Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.

Careful when choosing another TLDs.
An important point I see is people register other TLDs unintentionally and so quickly if they can't get one looking for, and sometimes situation becomes such that they have to lose it. For example Xwidget is the registered trademark of company X who has registered a domain Xwidget.com and if someone registers other TLDs like Xwidget.org etc which are naturally be going to company’s asset you have to surrender the domain name. However it all depends on the words in domain name how specific they are.

Check yourself domain status before buying

• Trademark, trade name, name of a person and names of international organization are protected by this policy generic terms are not subjected to this. For example annadior.com resembled the famous label Christian Dior thus led to surrender the domain.

• Another good example of above can be case of theberrycompany.com which is quite a generic term however the domain was registered much after the trademark and respondent was unable to show any interest behind registering it this led to lose it.

• What was the reason and interest behind the registering the domain name, what content under this has already been created and how much branding the website has earned under this domain are the strong supporter in case everything is against accused.

• In general the complainant must be able to prove that accused has no legitimate right to use it, he has no interest in it and it has been registered with bad faith.

• In case someone has created the website under the brand name of a person or company with the content that damage their image in public for example pornographic websites then the complainant has legal right to get it back.

• Cross border limits does not impose any barrier in infringement case proceedings as they are handled by WIPO and registrar are abide by the rules.

• Country code domain names such as .co.uk are handled by respective country’s government as Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) does not apply to those.

The fee involved in domain dispute resolution depends on number of domain and the panelist generally it is somewhere 1500$. The fee is paid by the initiator of complaint and in some cases it is equally divided between challengers and accused. This is why people prefer to settle down the case with any arbitration. A detailed description of fees can be found here http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/fees/index.html