What’s a cybersquatting?

Cyber­squat­ting is a prac­tice that con­sists in tak­ing a domain name by reg­is­ter­ing it, using or men­tion­ing a trade­mark, a busi­ness name, a patronym or any name on which the appli­cant has any right, in order to make mate­r­i­al or moral prof­it from its cur­rent or future noto­ri­ety.

The cybersquatting’s pur­pos­es can be dif­fer­ent:

• Resell or bar­gain the domain name with the legit­i­mate brand;
• Block access to the name, the trade­marks;
• Dam­age the brand or the legit­i­mate company’s image, by asso­ci­at­ing for exam­ple, a domain name to a porn web­site;
• Ben­e­fit from the brand’s noto­ri­ety to attract the traf­fic on web­site by using a domain name ;
• Asso­ciate the domain name to a fraud­u­lent web­site used for a « phish­ing » attack or to give cred­i­bil­i­ty to a scam cir­cu­lat­ing by spam;
• Asso­ciate a domain name to a web­site which dis­plays coun­ter­feit prod­ucts;
• Use the domain name for the spam mails send­ing.       

Some cyber­squat­ters auto­mat­i­cal­ly mon­i­tor domain names of well-known com­pa­nies, hop­ing that they for­get to renew their domain name. These names will imme­di­ate­ly be re-reg­is­tered with the pur­pose to car­ry out a pos­si­ble finan­cial nego­ti­a­tion…

How to protect against cybersquatting?

• Nameshield pro­vides a mon­i­tor­ing of trade­marks and domain names’ reg­is­tra­tions in order to be imme­di­ate­ly alert­ed from all cas­es of cyber­squat­ting affect­ing your brands.

• In order to fight against these cyber­squat­ting actions and assert your rights, a team of Nameshield’s experts will imple­ment a tar­get­ed legal action to recu­per­ate your rights on the cyber­squat­ted domain name.

Source: Nameshield’s White paper – Under­stand­ing domain names