Verizon issued a press release today that announced a record $33.5M cybersquatting judgment against OnlineNIC. There were 663 domains in question and the judge chose to award $50K per domain, presumably under the guidelines of the Anti-Cybersquatting Protection Act (ACPA), which allow a penalty of between $1K and $100K per domain. Very little is known about the actual case, and nearly all of the blog posts and press coverage simply restate the press release.
ICANN had been planning on a radical transformation of the gTLD system in May 2009 that would result in a tremendous expansion of available gTLDs (current examples of gTLDs include .biz, .mobi, .com, .org). The proposal would basically allow anyone with $185K to buy a new gTLD (although technically those are application fees).
In the Vulcan Golf vs. Google case, the judge recently denied a motion by the plaintiffs to turn the lawsuit into a class action. We've mentioned the lawsuit before, but the general gist is that the plaintiffs are alleging that Google and several other parties participate in trademark infringement by selling ads on infringing domain names.
We're excited to announce the launch of the PoachMark Pool - a collaborative approach to catching trademark poachers. It allows you to benefit from the discoveries of other members.
We picked up these recent additions to several seasonal searches. This is a tradition that Google has been doing since 2005. We've found six already - let us know if you find any more.
Sarah Bird at SEOMoz put together an excellent summary of the DSW vs. Zappos case. DSW sued Zappos because one of Zappo's affiliates created organic pages that targeted DSW terms, used DSW TMs in the domain names, used DSW images, but linked to Zappos pages (through CJ).
I sat in on a meeting of the Rocky Mountain Affiliate Marketing Association (RMAMA) and presented an overview of BrandVerity and how an affiliate manager should use the service. The meeting consisted of a group of merchants OPMs and interested third parties.
One of the things that I forgot to mention in my second talk at PubCon was that the search engines will provide you very little trademark defense if your trademark utilizes a generic term. Microsoft provides a good overview of their trademark policies on a recent post on the AdCenter blog. Note this section:
My slides from the Domains and Trademark Issues panel at PubCon are here. I went through a number of tools that website owners can use to find abuse in domains and PPC.
