Intellectual Property

When company Transure Enterprise registered baylorcme.com and fansofbaylor.com and offered them to Baylor University for $500, the last thing it probably expected was to end up in an arbitration dispute. Because the Waco, Texas, university has a trademark for “Baylor University,” it took the cybersquatter to the National Arbitration Forum. …

From the title of this blog, one might imagine having to stand in line at some type of bureau for websites to get the proper licensing needed, but it is actually not that complicated. In the most simplistic scenario, you are the owner of your website and thus own the …

French fashion house Chanel has won a dispute filed with the WIPO covering five domains: chanelbagsale.com, chanelbageshop.com, chanelhandbags.org, chanel-sale.com, and chanelsale.net. Naturally, the company contended that the names violated its trademark and were being used in bad faith. The registrant failed to respond to these allegations. Personally, I don’t even …

1&1 Internet has launched a new domain package feature designed to help businesses protect their brand online. At first glance, it looks like a great deal. It not only conveniently suggests names cybersquatters could pick up, but offers a discount on the registration cost: three domains for $19.99 and five …

German file hosting site RapidShare has filed a domain dispute to take control of six domains containing the term “rapidshare.” This is rather ironic because intellectual property advocates have attacked the site in the past for hosting pirated content, but now the 35th-most-visited site is trying to protect its own …

Elliot’s Blog covered a story this week about a domain dispute involving wooot.com at the URDP . Although the complainant, Woot.com, won the case, it did not get the domain. What happened? As it turns out, the URDP doesn’t necessarily always transfer the domain to the winner. In this instance, …

French fashion house Louis Vuitton recently filed a complaint to get its hands on lvmobile.com, only to lose in the arbitration hearing this week. The company claimed the domain violated its trademarks for “Louis Vuitton,” “Vuitton,” and “LV.” Fortunately, the arbitrator decided that the letters “lv” could not be confused …

Normally the domains big corporations fight for are pretty useless. Recently, however, Google filed a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum over a name that is very important for its brand protection: qoogle.com. The name is so important because the “q” looks very much like a “g.” A quick visit …

Meet Alf Temme. His portfolio of more than one thousand trademark-violating typo domains has landed him numerous lawsuits over the years from a range of companies. These include Dell, Air France, and America Online. He admits to being a typosquatter, using names like d3ell.com to sell exercise machines on his …

With the imminent launch of the iPad, speculators are scrambling to register any iPad domain they can think of. These names are now starting to trickle onto eBay, and as you can expect, the sellers have some pretty outrageous asking prices. For TheiPadShoppe.com, one seller wants $60. Not withstanding the …