The Deep Pockets Syndrome in Reverse
So Facebook has joined Myspace and Twitter in enabling personalized web-addresses, with half a million addresses grabbed within minutes of the scheme going live. According to the Sunday Times www.facebook.com/princecharles went to a guy in Hawaii. Surprise, surprise, the cyber-squatters have moved in. Girls Aloud, Rolls-Royce, Waitrose, Morrisons and thousands more celebrity and company names have all gone to hijackers.
No doubt these cyber-squatters think they can sell back the addresses to legitimate owners wanting to reclaim their own names. These fast-acting squatters think they’re so clever with their extortion racket (because that’s what it is). What they don’t realize is that they are about to lose out big time. The world has moved on since cybersquatting was profitable in the early days of the internet. Numerous missives from WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) have ruled that such actions are in breach of intellectual property rights (IPR). If you use Marks & Spencer’s name to attract visitors to your site, then their lawyers will take you down – not for extortion, but for breach of IPR, which is much easier to prove.
The extortionists think they are cleverly playing the Deep Pockets game – believing large organizations will pay up to retrieve their names. There’s no point in stealing from poor people. But Deep Pockets can also operate in reverse – they can afford to defend themselves.
What is more, companies and celebrities are being helped by new sharks on the block. Now there are groups of lawyers who specialize in going after IPR infringers on behalf of these companies. It’s an open and shut case, and they have the resources to bankrupt the squatters. If your name isn’t Harrod then mere ownership of www.facebook.com/harrods is a slam dunk for the opposition – who with malice aforethought will grind you into the dirt.
Of course Facebook could stop all this nonsense. They reserve the right to close accounts. If they made it a condition that names cannot be transferred for payment, then any evidence of a demand for money could lead to closedown.
All the while the sharks are circling. My advice to cyber-squatters is to give up these addresses immediately. I already smell blood on the water.
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Some questions… without needing an answer…
We have reached a point where companies are trying to buy “names” related with their own brand name in services which are widely used and adopted by huge number of users worldwide. We have seen what is happening every time a new A Class DNS is introduced. Is it really necessary to own all the possible names produced by the brand name e.g. (not a company’s brand but just an example) madona, madonna, madona, mantona, and how will a company going to make me not use a name exactly the same as its brand? Hey… I want to use the name patata but i t looks like it is related in some way with the word potato since it means the same thing in Greek. It seems that Lays has to “buy” that name in every language but heyyyy, maybe Humpty Dumpty can offer more money to “buy” that name. And later, no country would be able to use that word again.
Also, dns names don’t have a big company managing them. How about a big company offering a widely used service like facebook? Why would a company bother “buying” names again from a company which might be its competitor too? Imagine Twitter trying to block its name from being used as http;//www.facebook.com/twitter.
Another point too… do you remember the website which existed some months ago (i don’t know if it still exists), you just had to enter tfl.gov.com instead of tfl.gov.uk (or something similar) that was making fun of the services provided by London Transport. Well… it seems that London transport could find find some great proposals for improving their services in that site. Do you thing that they even bothered reading what was written there?
It seems that it is not only an IPR issue. but also one more issue that lawyers are involved trying to cover what the managers don’t want to fix.
(things are not that simple of course, but I hope that what I wrote can make someone think further than the “name issue”).