What is a Cybersquatter?
Cybersquatting is the act of registering domain names, especially those connected with celebrities or recognizable trademarks, with the intention of reselling them at an inflated price. A cybersquatter takes advantage of the domain registration companies’ ‘first come, first served’ policy by submitting a large list of very popular words and names all at once. While the domain registration company is in the process of entering these names, the cybersquatter uses profits from individual domain resales to finance the required registration fees. A cybersquatter can literally sit on a popular domain name for years, causing grief to the actual celebrity or company it represents. As long as a cybersquatter is recognized as the legitimate owner of BillClinton.com, for example, the real former president cannot legally use his own name as a domain. He would have to pursue a lawsuit to compel the cybersquatter to relinquish the name, or actually pay whatever price the current owner assigns. Until
Basically, a cybersquatter is someone who registers domain name addresses with the primary purpose to resell them. Cybersquatters prey on the uniqueness of the domain name address to extract their ransom. Like the radio frequencies or a telephone number, a particular domain name address can be issued to only one person or organization. Trademark owners have been rudely awakened to find these “cybersquatters” blocking the path to registering a domain name address based on their trademark. Just ask Panavision, the owner of the trademarks “Panavision” and “Panaflex”. When Panavision tried to register “panavision.com” as their domain name address, they found out that a cybersquatter (Toeppen) had already registered “panavision.com”. Indeed, Toeppen had registered about 240 domain name addresses, many of them based on relatively well-known marks So what could a trademark owner do to evict the cybersquatter from a domain name address based on their mark? The previous approach was to file sui
