Sounds familiar… or sounds similar? What’s in a name?
13 May 2008
The choice of a company’s domain name has raised smiles and blood pressures recently and led to some entertaining revelations.
There are just ideas that prompt the response ‘I wish I’d thought of that!’ Buying domain names before the big boys is one of them.
You have to admire the man in the US who bought and maintained the domain name pizza.com since 1994. It cost Chris Clarke of Maryland around £180 over the 14 years. He sold it on an online auction for $2.6million (around £1.3million).
We should have seen it coming. North America has a great phone number system where businesses can use the dial to spell out the business on the phone number; making it easy for customers to remember to dial 74992 for PIZZA, for example. About 15 years ago, someone bought all the phone numbers spelling out pizza, petals (for florists) etc and cleaned up as they sold them to local businesses. All together, now: ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’ The trouble with these ruses is that you can only do them once. No-one would be daft enough to fall for the same trick again – would they?
Apparently, the worldwide web caught us all unawares. Cybersquatting, taking a domain name that could be used by another business, is on the increase. Some time ago, there was a case where someone registered Cadbury as a website for their public relations business. The PR man offered to sell the domain to the chocolate maker for a vast sum. Cadbury argued that the company had a stronger claim to the name and it was, after a court hearing, surrendered with the judge reasoning that no-one would click onto Cadbury.com expecting to read all about marketing services instead of yummy chocolate. There was no litigation then, just a ruling and the surrender of the domain name.
I was talking to some people from Sundance recently, not for a screen test, but to find out more about the mixed COTS DSP and FPGA architectures, hardware boards and software that the English company designs and manufacturers. It registered Sundance.com many years ago and then received a phone call from the States. Robert Redford’s people wanted the company to stop using the domain name as it was needed for the Sundance film festival. David stood up to Goliath, arguing that it had a valid reason for the domain name and had got in first. Apparently, the price offered for choosing another domain name increased but the film festival, while it may rank higher in a Google search, is to be found at sundance.org, and sundance.com remains the site if you are looking for DSP boards.
According to Josh Bourne of Fair Winds Partners, an internet strategy consultancy, there is a distinction between the fraudulent abuse of domain registration, (or malicious cybersquatting), and coincidences like Sundance. In the US there has been anti-cybersquatting legislation since 1999 but that does not seem to be preventing these shenanigans. With one million sites registered each day, the appropriation of names that can infringe trademarks or mislead visitors is a large problem.
Last year, there were 2,156 complaints alleging cybersquatting filed with the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the United Nations agency responsible for protecting IP worldwide. This may seem insignificant compared to the daily site registration rate, but is 18 per cent more than in 2006 and 48 per cent more complaints than received in 2005. Cybersquatting and ‘cyber-tasting’, where a domain name can be registered and traffic monitored for five days before it has to be bought or relinquished, are thought to cost companies around $1billion each year in diverted sales, loss of goodwill and the expense of safeguarding or defending their .com name.
I am just off to check that no-one has registered carolinehayesforworldleader.com yet.
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