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
