Domain squatting, cybersquatting and typosquatting

Are you charged with managing a brand in the marketplace? Do you stress over protecting your brand image?

No doubt you’ve seen or been confronted with the unauthorized registration of brands or company names online.

Today the U.N.’s World Intellectual Property Organization ruled in favor of Jay Leno instead of a cybersquatter in Texas who registered the domain thejaylenoshow.com five years ago (read the story on MSN).

You’ll recall the dot-com era when everyone was infatuated with the Web and raced to secure their own piece of the action.

For existing companies, securing their own domain name became a top priority.

Today, when you name a company, instead of checking to see if the name is registered legally, you first go online to see if the domain name is available. Yes, times have changed.

People who purchase domain names with the intent to profit from the goodwill or a trademark belonging to someone else are known as cybersquatters. The practice is called cybersquatting or domain squatting.

Registering a domain that’s similarly spelled to an existing domain is known as typosquatting.

Usually these types of domains are used as referral sites with paid advertising links designed to make the owner some money.

What’s most frustrating for a brand manager is when a legitimate name they should be managing is owned by someone else, someone without the authority to operate under that name.

Isn’t it interesting how the Internet is used to circumvent authority? We’ll save that lengthy discussion for another time.

I’ve blogged about the importance of reserving your brand name(s) online before. With the advent of social media, it’s more important than ever for brand managers to monitor new platforms and ensure that they own the appropriate domain names. And those names may need to include variants of trademarked names, just for safe keeping.

Recommended Reading

Wikipedia’s entry on Cybersquatting