1. Cyber What?
Cybersquatting. It’s where a company or individual chooses to register, sell, or use a domain name – the unique ‘handle’ relating to the IP address of the computer on which a particular website is hosted – with the sole purpose of profiting financially, or in some other way, from aother brand’s trade mark or even Intellectual Property.

Put simply, it’s when someone nicks the name of your website.

Typically this involves:

• The cybersquatter registering a domain name incorporatin g another company’s trade mark or trade name. For instance, if Nominet has built a brand up around the domain nominet.org.uk, someone could register nominet.co.uk and try and sell it back to Nominet at a profit.
  

• A company losing its domain name to an opportunist squatter – perhaps because they have inadvertently failed to renew it – with similar results.
  

• The cybersquatter posting defamatory, disparaging and/or other damaging content referring to the victim on the site in dispute, in the hope of a quick sale of the domain as the victim tries to minimise potential harm to their business.

2. Isn’t that illegal?
There’s (a little) room for debate here, with some taking the view that such activity is in the spirit of free market economics. There’s little question of its ethical and moral dubiousness however.
UK civil courts base their approach on registered and unregistered trade mark law however, which
means that if a domain name is similar to a trade mark registered to the claimant, it may fall under registered trade mark infringement.

Where a name only has value because of the reputation built up in the unregistered name by the claimant, that money is made on the back of goodwill, which the original trader put effort into creating. UK courts tend to take a dim view of both these activities.

3. What Else?
Other variations include “typosquatting”, where the squatter registers a name that’s a deliberate misspelling of a popular site. The aim here is to profit when ever a user makes a typo putting the web address into their browser. Typo- squat based sites typically contain pay-per-click ads with monies directed to the typosquatter each time a user clicks on a link. Additionally, cybersquatters often refuse to sell a disputed domain for a “reasonable” amount (part of the appeal is trying to sweat the victim for an inflated price).

On other occasions the trade mark owner will have their own reasons for not settling. They may want to discourage further cybersquatters, for example, or may refuse to pay the squatter off on principle.

In these situations, court or arbitration proceedings may be required to recover the domain name in dispute.

4. Is cybersquatting lucrative then?
Extremely in some cases. According to Nominet’s 2007 Domain Name Industry Report, there is an active market in buying, selling, and storing domain names, with sales regularly exceeding 100,000 and with peak values reaching more than 1 million.

Based on current renewals trends revealed in the report, in the next two years alone, over 140,000 .co.uk domains will be re-registered less than 10 seconds after they become available.

5. How can I solve the problem?
If you believe you’ve fallen victim, a number of options are available such as pursuing litigation through the courts or via dispute resolution services.

The latter can be a cost effective, efficient method of resolving conflicts and a variety are available to UK businesses online, including Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) for .uk domain names, and the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) for .com, .net and others.

The success of such practices has meant that it is now possible to guard against potential cyber threats costeffectively. The challenge is to ensure that resolution services adapt to what is a rapidly changing online environment.

6. Who else can help?
Increasing nu mbers of law firms now specialise in negotiating domain name disputes and can, where necessary, represent complainants in arbitration.

This process is generally less costly than formal litigation, but the expense can still be prohibitive – especially where the domain name itself is of no particular or great value. Because of this, many disputes are resolved via negotiated settlements.

One of the main precautions is as simple as remembering to renew your domain names in a timely fashion. Renewing before expiration should be a top priority and not something to be managed complacently, as failure to renew even seconds after expiry can result in your on line brand identity being snapped up there and then.

The Nominet 2007 Domain Name Industry Report emphasises the serious need for businesses to prioritise in this area. A surprising 14% of businesses don’t renew until the day after their renewal date, often citing plain forgetfulness. This can be a costly mistake.

Also, with renewal being a fairly straightforward process (with a 6 month renewal period in advance of the expiry date for .uk names), there’s no reason why a domain name should ever be lost!

It’s also not a bad idea to register several similar domain names (‘yourname. co. uk’ and ‘yourname.org. uk’ for example) so no-one else can come in later and capitalise on your brand name using another domain extension.