YNOT – Cybersquatters apparently didn’t get the memo listing the reasons why the new dot-xxx adults-only domain space would be a bad investment for them. Here, for their benefit, are a few:
1) Unlike in the early days of the web, the online adult entertainment industry no longer issues licenses to print money.
2) Adult brand owners who were unwilling to spend $300 or so per domain to snap up the corresponding dot-xxx names during the Sunrise and Landrush early registration periods are even less likely to drop thousands of dollars to claim those domains from people who are opportunistic at best and cyber-criminals at worst.
3) ICM Registry, which operates the dot-xxx domain space under contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, evidently intends to keep its promise not to allow cybersquatting within its realm.
On Tuesday, ICM Chief Executive Officer Stuart Lawley announced the registry had suspended a number of domain registrations accomplished by “a handful of individuals” who appeared to have purchased the domains in bad faith. According to Lawley, an in-house investigation instigated by direct brand owner complaints and comments on various social media outlets resulted in the suspension of 50-70 domains that displayed “unmistakable, blatant cybersquatting in violation of [ICM’s] policies.”
ICM’s baseline policies prohibit the registration of “strings that infringe the intellectual property rights of a third party, including common law trademark rights; strings that are obvious variants of well-known trademarks not belonging to the registrant; first and last names of an individual other than the individual or his/her agent, or names that suggest the presence of child abuse images.” All dot-xxx registrants agree to abide by those policies when they register a domain name in the space.
Among the domains suspended Tuesday were BusinessWeek.xxx, CNBC.xxx, Geocities.xxx, Nextag.xxx, Snapfish.xxx, VerizonWireless.xxx, WashingtonPost.xxx, Gayroom.xxx and Boykakke.xxx. The erstwhile registrants, Lawley said, will receive no reimbursement of fees. And, he indicated, the financial loss serves the cybersquatters right.
“It’s a business model we said we weren’t going to tolerate, and this is proof we’re not going to tolerate it,” he told YNOT.com. “It would have been disingenuous of us to turn our backs on these violations. The abuses were very clear-cut.”
ICM did not require the brand owners to seek redress under the registry’s Rapid Evaluation Service or Charter Eligibility Dispute Resolution Process — both of which allow rights owners to claim infringing domain names after a paid third-party review — because the abusive registrants were deemed “repeat or serial offenders,” Lawley said. He added that ICM will step in before a case goes to litigation or arbitration in situations where an alleged cybersquatter has registered three or more potentially infringing domains with the overt intent to sell them to an intellectual property owner. Many of the registrants in Tuesday’s crop already had contacted their intended marks, Lawley noted.
He also said ICM Registry is the only registry to handle egregious cybersquatting in-house. Other registries require brand owners to seek rulings from bodies like the World Intellectual Property Organization, the National Arbitration Forum or civil courts no matter how many domains are at issue. ICM will judge each allegation on a case-by-case basis, Lawley said, but generally three domains apparently cybersquatted by the same individual is enough to trigger an investigation by ICM.
“ICM Registry has raised the bar on responsible registry operations, and we intend to maintain the highest standards,” Lawley said. “We will not tolerate nefarious conduct and will exercise our right to take appropriate action when we detect widespread repeat patterns of cybersquatting activity.
“Would-be cybersquatters are on notice: Neither ICM Registry nor the dot-xxx community will be complicit in the theft or abuse of intellectual property,” he added.
Lawley said ICM and the board of directors for the International Foundation for Online Responsibility — the non-profit organization funded by a portion of dot-xxx registrations and tasked with setting standards and practices for the domain space — have not determined what will be done with the suspended domains. At least some of them, like Boykakke.xxx, potentially infringe on brands whose owners have stated they bear no interest in registering dot-xxx domains, even defensively. However, Lawley admitted, simply returning the domain names to the registration pool and giving another potential cybersquatter a chance at them would make little sense.
On Wednesday afternoon, all of the dot-xxx domains mentioned as suspended in this report remained associated with their former owners in ICM’s WHOIS database.
