Nic News ..

New Regulations for Norway

Norwegian organisations will soon be able to register up to 15 domains names and will not have to produce evidence of a connection between their company name and their desired domain name.

There will be a transition period from 19-23 February, during which time applications will be stored, no new registrations will be carried out and duplicate applications will be eliminated. After this period, applications for the same domain name will be decided by lot, until the new first come, first served policy comes into effect on 28 February.

Industry Update ..

Dell wins Korea case

Dell this week succeeded in banning a Korean computer vendor trading from the web address dellkorea.com. Dell argued successfully that the cybersquatter was creating confusion in the minds of Korean customers.

Bruce Springsteen loses cybersquatting case

Rock star Bruce Springsteen this week lost his bid to evict a fan club hosted on www.brucespringsteen.com. The decision, taken by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) was a rare blow to a famous star - in recent years most cybersquatting decisions have gone in favour of the rich and famous.

The panel rules that Jeff Burgar, a Canadian holding the brucespringsteen.com domain name, had 'demonstrated that he has some rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name and (Springsteen) had failed to demonstrate that the domain name was being used in bad faith.'

Kidman gets her domain

Nicole Kidman fared much better this week in the domain name stakes that the marriage ones, when she won the right to the domain names www.nicolekidmannude.com and www.nicholekidman.com (despite the spelling error) from a notorious cybersquatter.

The WIPO decision awarded her the names, saying that she had established a clear right to her name, and any variations on it. The defendant, John Zuccarini, is a frequent attendee at WIPO hearings, having been the subject of actions by Encyclopedia Britannica and Hewlett-Packard. The decision said that he had established 'an overall pattern of misuse of famous marks for illegitimate purposes.'

NetNames news

AA cybersquatter is a person who registers a domain name and poses any number of threats to the name, with the intent of taking advantage of the company or individual to whom the domain name refers to.

There are six types:

1. Typosquatters or roadsigns - buy a confusingly similar name to attract your traffic. May be only one letter difference, e.g. yorbrand.com.

2. Innocents - buy your name exactly, but in a different country code top-level domain (cctld), e.g. yourbrand.fr. Most likely to be in a country where registration restrictions are low (a high-risk country).

3. Spies - buy your name exactly, with a different but similar suffix, to receive any mis-directed email. E.g. You own yourname.com, they register yourname.co.uk. Any person writing to anyone@yourname.com may accidentally write to anyone@yourname.co.uk - resulting in the spy receiving your email and your website traffic.

4. Opportunists - buy your name or variations of your name to sell it back to you for profit.

5. Cyberjackers - registers a domain name similar to a company name to report and criticise your company or brand, e.g. yourbrandsucks.com. Defamatory information can be viewed worldwide.

6. Imitators - buy a variation of your trademark to promote themselves and their own products on the back of your brand equity.

Fact of the Week..

Top Domain Holders

Over the past few months, a few extremely large collections owned by single individuals or companies have emerged. In order to limit the bias of this type of activity on the domain name geography reported here, these domains were deleted from the database before any analysis took place. However, it is interesting to note the size of the five largest holdings.

Tip of the Week ..

Why not celebrate your firm's partnerships with a domain name? If your company signs a deal with a partner, make sure that you register the domain eg. yourcompanypartnercompany.com before any news of the partnership is announced.

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