Google Wins Cybersquatting Dispute
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Cybersquatting was all over the press a few years back, not long after businesses discovered what a good website could do for them. It doesn't make the news very often anymore, but it still happens. Google recently won a near-textbook cybersquatting dispute. The case is instructive for anyone concerned with protecting their good domain name online.
Possessing a very popular and well-known name has its good side and its bad side. It's a wonderful thing when you're an online business and everyone knows who you are -- to the point of being the first place that many Netizens stop to see where they want to travel on the Information Superhighway. Search engine Google has this distinction, but it carries with it the problem that a lot of people want to ride on its coat tails. In this case, imitation is not exactly the sincerest form of flattery.
So one can imagine that it must have been a relief at the Googleplex to receive the ruling from National Arbitration Forum arbitrator Paul A. Dorf in favor of the search engine. In what has been referred to by the Associated Press as a "typosquatting" dispute, Dorf found that Sergey Gridasov did not have a legitimate right to use four domain names that were each within a letter of Google's registered domain name. All four illegitimate domain names were registered after Google registered its own name in late 1999.
Sergey Gridasov, who lives in St. Petersburg, Russia, did not respond to Google's complaint, filed in early May. This meant that the arbitrator could accept all of Google's reasonable allegations as true. Given that the four Internet domains registered by Gridasov were googkle.com, ghoogle.com, gfoogle.com, and gooigle.com, one can reasonable assume that he was depending on the similarity in names to raise the traffic to his own sites. Gridasov registered the domains through Computer Services Langenbach GmbH, whose website for domain name registration is Joker.com. As of this writing, word of the ruling had not reached Joker.com; it still shows the four domains as belonging to Gridasov. (That will likely no longer be true when this story goes to press). I didn't visit any of the four sites directly, for reasons I will make clear shortly.
Next: Cybersquatting in the Worst Way >>
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