Intellectual Property

Leo Enriquez was fired from Aurora Health Clinic in Chicago five years ago. As it turns out, his employer lost more than an employee when the termination took place. As an officer manager, one of Enriquez’s jobs was was to manage the clinic’s domains. Instead of registering them in the …

Florida resident Chris Williams must have thought he was really on to something when he registered victoriassecretangelcreditcard.com. As with most cybersquatting, he used the domain name to setup a website with third-party links, some of which linked to competitors of the popular lingerie company. He did not respond to the …

Cybersquatting has been a problem for many years, and one of the chief criticisms of ICANN has been its failure to stop the problem. With the new gTLD system coming next year, trademark holders are pushing ICANN to take action. Now a plan to stop cybersquatting is being planned. Known …

It hasn’t been long since Cameroon announced plans to offer its .CM domain to the world at large, but a number of premium names have already sold at auction. So far the highest sale has been Cars.cm for £21,455 ($35,000 USD). The highest sales have all been generic names. Here …

Beer giant Heineken apparently missed out on the .tel sunrise period, and now wants to get its hands on Heineken.tel. The only problem is, someone else has already registered it. Now the brewer has filed a WIPO complaint to take the name from its owner. Normally these sorts of issues …

In a recent cybersquatting case, a company in the UK Virgin Islands named Transure Enterprise Ltd registered two domains: radioshackl.com and radioshackultimate.com. I am sure you can already see where this is going. TRS Quality Inc, a subsidiary of Radioshack, filed a complaint in early May arguing that the domains …

The lesson here is: never mess with people who can build anything they want out of tiny little colored blocks. The respondent, Giocchino Zerbo of Italy now knows that all too well. He registered two domain names: legogames.com and wwwlegos.com. Surely he knew this would cause him trouble, but maybe …

For years Cameroon’s government leased out the .cm domain to Agoga.com. Because .cm is a common typo of .com, the company set up a system where if you entered any address ending with .cm, it took you to a webpage filled with ads. Agoga made millions from this deal, profiting …

Yahoo recently launched a new service called Search Pad, a free tool designed for researchers that lets you track and organize sites found on Yahoo Search. In a blunder similar to when Pizza Hut launched a new brand and failed to acquire the relevant domains, Yahoo launched its new product …

At one time the cybersquatting perpetrators were fringe geeky hackers locked in their mothers’ basements Now, entire organizations are forming with the sole goal of sitting on expensive domains and hoping to cash out on them. But like the spammers who have been reduced to sending nonsensical series of letters …