This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
That's kinda how cybersquatting laws work.
Someone registered an available domain hours after I searched for it when I received our trademark. The domain was immediately put up for sale. I spent almost a year getting my ducks in a row to sue and reclaim the domain (I even had screenshots of the availability. The scammer was watching registration queries) but they let the domain expire for lack of interest. I scooped it up after that.
Legit question: why didn't you take the domain before trademark was issued?
If you already had the name registered (but not issued), couldn't you essentially cybersquat yourself and then buy it from yourself after it's been issued?
We had no intention of making/hosting a website with the trademark. The company was in agreement.
After we got it, the bossman comes to me and says "so we can make this email addresses now, right?"
Like, duuude... It's not his expertise, I know, but he thought web pages and email was totally separate systems.
Anyway, that was almost 25 years ago. All water under the bridge.
Sounds like you fucked up, tbh, you should've bought the domain even if not intending to use it, just for brand safety
I couldn't agree more.
I spent almost a year getting my ducks in a row to sue and reclaim the domain
The cost in time and resources for all of that, vs just registering the domain in the first place. 🙄
Squatters do this shit every day to regular people and small businesses, but they don't have the money to convince a judge to hand over a domain.
Hey it's just fair, and the judge has a new sports car suddenly and or a yacht.
What the judge should have done is threaten to cut the domain name in half and see who was willing to give up their claim out of motherly love.
I wonder how much the city of LA would pay to get La.com back haha.
The city of LA should not get a .com name. They might have a case that la.com should not have a .com either (they look like a tourist .org though if they are not acting like a .org they are scammers) - but this would be a very hard sell in court. The city of LA should have a .gov (which won't allow them) or .us (which is not organized well - something they should be mad about and pressure to get fixed) name.
I think the initial goal of top level domains having any real meaning is dead.
Why a city would want a .com tld? A .gov tld would be far more applicable IMO
Annoyingly, people are more likely to "blind guess" at .com than .gov, just cause there's more of them
Do people even still exist who have the arcane knowledge to type in a domain directly?
Hey, that's not arcane knowledge.
Arcane knowledge is memorising the server's IP address.
The court ruled that Blair lacked any right to the name and had only adopted the moniker after buying the domain.
So he wasn't rich enough to buy the domain that he paid for ?
Let A.I. have the internet. Humans are done using it.
He only adopted the moniker after failing to get Lamborghini to pay the very high price he wanted for the domain. If he wanted the domain to adopt the moniker he wouldn't have tried to sell the domain in the first place.
I don’t have all the details to the case, but after reading the article I kinda think they got it wrong.
Let that man call himself Lambo and keep the domain. As long as he isn’t pretending to represent another brand, such as Lamborghini.
They got it right because they sided with the wealthy corporation.
Not sure why others are defending the defendant here. He was just a cyber squatter who had no ties to the name Lambo until after he bought the domain. His only goal was to resell it to Lamborghini for a profit.
I mean, if we are going to capitalism with a straight face we have to start being the whole bitch.
He owned it, Lamborghini wanted it... that made it a valuable asset that he held that Lamborghini should have paid for
it's easy to see it that way when a big corporation is involved, but average people and small businesses get fucked by cybersquatters too.
On balance I tend to side against the cybersquatters. They are not providing any value to anyone, just leeching dollars from the economy.
Greed was hia downfall, nothing else. He started by listing it at 1 million, but then kept refusing bids to buy and kept raising the price up to 75 million.
Greedy bastard got what he deserved.
Both ends of this are frustrating. Buying a domain either as a purely speculative asset (as the judge correctly labeled this purchase as) so you can 1) get under someones skin enough to make them want to buy the domain from you, or 2) just buying up every popular or potentially popular domain just to sell if off is scummy behaviour that ideally this guy should never have been able to do in the first place.
The other end of this I don’t like though is the possibility of somebody being able to convince a judge that they should own your domain and then just being able to take it. In this case I think the judge ruled correctly but the idea that somebody (especially in the US government) would be able to just take away my domain on a whim is terrifying when you can’t just go to people and say “hey, the person you are going to this domain for has now moved and is now here”. Things like e-mail address, monitoring, firewall exceptions and many self-hosted sites assume that the owner of the domain does not change hands without permission, and trust the domain blindly. Taking away a domain isn’t just like taking away somebodies nickname. It’s taking away their online identity and forced impersonation.
I really wish there was a way to address each other in a decentralised way that doesn’t just push the problem down to something like a public key, where the same problem exists except now you worry about the key being compromised.
The fact that we have ways to coordinate globally unique addresses that we collectively agree on who owns what is a feat. It just sucks that it’s also something which somebody can take away from you.
I recently took over as webmaster for a small local charity, basic website, some backend things to sort, no big deal.
But they're on a .net and I asked why? A previous webmaster let their domain lapse 10 FUCKING YEARS AGO, and one of those squatters grabbed it and has been holding it ever since. They wanted like $10k to give it back so these people just made a .net
It's fucking ridiculous. I set a timer to try and grab it next time it expires, but I'm assuming they have their renewals automated.
I don't get it. Since when are similar words and cultural references and nicknames too owned by the trademark owner?
It was pretty normal for most of the age of trademarks' existence to use such derived references, including commercial use.
"He tried to claim ... a word play on "lamb" and not ... " - why would he have to?
I'm (ok, not really identifying as a fan of anything, but it's good) a Star Wars fan and I can point out plenty of such references there to other authors' creations, and George Lucas notably doesn't hide or deny that, actually the opposite.
They are owned by the trademark when the person owning/using the name is acting like the trademark. Trademark law is generally based around would someone be confused if they say the other one. I could start a house construction business can call it Lamborghini without a problem so long as I was very clear in all advertising that I'm only building houses and not in any way related to the cars - but if I start putting Lamborghini cars in my advertising I could get into trouble for creating confusion even though my competitor Joe's houses has cars in his ads. (this is obviously a made up situation)
From the article "didn’t develop the site, had attacked the company on more than one occasion, and tried to profit from its established reputation."
If he had developed that site in what looked like good faith he would have kept it. However all indications were he didn't care about Lambo as anything other than a get rich quick scheme and that will fail to trademark since the name is only valuable if it is confused with the trademark. A parody site (obvious parody) would have been fine. Obvious star wars fan sites as welll (though this could infringe on other trademarks so care is needed). Even adopting Lambo as his nickname could have worked - but if that was his intent he wouldn't have tried to sell.
That judge is a dumbass and any precedent that 'justifies' this ruling should be reviewed and struck down. This is called theft. And do eminent domain too while we're at it.
Fun fact some states took this into thier own hands
https://www.nh.gov/glance/state-constitution/bill-rights
[Art.] 12-a. [Power to Take Property Limited.] No part of a person's property shall be taken by eminent domain and transferred, directly or indirectly, to another person if the taking is for the purpose of private development or other private use of the property.
Stupid greedy asshole got what he deserved. Could have made bank by selling it for 1 million already. But the greed rulebook said to keep raising it to 75 million.
Fuck Lamborghini too.
He raised the price higher than the cost of going to WIPO to deal with it. If he set the price to $1 or 2 million they likely would have paid it. $75 million is bonkers.
He also set precedence. A few more cases like this can the cost of going to court becomes cheaper for everyone.
Don't have much sympathy for this person but no company has any more right to a domain name than any of us and this sets a scary precedence.
Another great example of this being an economic rent problem.
Namecoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies, but never caught on because it's >99% domain name squatters. There's no mechanism to increase the cost of renewal to anything proportional to the value of the name, so they always renew for practically free. Consequently there's no incentive for web browsers to support it.
A domain name is like a plot of land. Right now our choices are crony capitalist ICANN with eminent domain, anarcho-capitalist crypto DNS, or sailing the high seas on an .onion address.
Hey hey hey, there’s i2p too.
I don't really feel any sympathy for this guy.
Hrmm let's see.. am I petty enough today...
Please avoid GoDaddy.
GoDaddy has been involved in many controversies since its foundation in 1997.
I prefer NameCheap, but almost anyone is better than GoDaddy.
*Edit: broken link
I always love these shitty “replace the enter key on a keyboard” news thumbnails. Like, ah shit, accidentally hit the “Domain Name Registration” button on my keyboard.
Unpopular opinion, but the judge was right. There would be zero benefit to society to reward this absolute cybersquatter. There's an almost zero benefit to reward a corporation. Both bad, but the corporation should get it in this case.
How is a cyber squatter worse than companies who squat on other things like money or diamonds.
The man bought the domain and if lambo wants it, they can buy it from him.
How long until other companies start trying to get any domain name that is part of their name now?
See: Nissan.com
Or the poor Italian guy Luca Armani, who registered armani.it in the early '90s for his rubber stamp shop.
He tried to keep his name in a lawsuit carried by the most famous Armani, and he lost. He also lost all of his money and his shop.
