How to deal with domain name squatters?

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Permalink Reply by David Locke on February 10, 2009 at 7:07pm

You are not dealing with squatters. Squatters have nothing, but possession. Domain name squatters have to have money and lawyers. If you want to go up against them, you need money and lawyers. The sheriff won't run them out for trespassing. You have to use trademark law, but get it straight, they used the trademark before you did. There is a clause in the legal definition of a trademark that requires not first use, but first commercial use. This is how lawyers take their use of the trademark away from them. You have to use it first. That might be hard if you can't use it in places where it isn't followed by ".com." Use it everywhere to generate real business. Then, by definition, you are the first commercial user. The squatters won't be able to prove commercial use.

Creating a unique name is the alternative to lawyers and money. Squatters don't have eveything covered.

Then, there is the matter of patent squatters. When the U.S. started issuing software and business process patents the inspectors were not qualified. They did not know the prior art. They learn the prior art in the sense of what they previously approved, not by doing research and finding out what is in the public domain. They relied on the courts to clean up the messes. There are messes to clean up. Patents are not valuable until the courts find in you favor. Patents is a money and lawyer game. Trade secrets might work better for you. SaaS certainly provides some protection, because all the users get is a client and a view. They don't get the code. They can't reengineer your code like they could with desktop installed software. Hint, leave some functionality that must be served, so you can protect it. Patent squatters hide stuff in employment contracts, and stay invisible just waiting for someone to cross into their general area. If you work for a GIS vendor, once you leave, you will never be allowed to write a single line of GIS code, because of your employment contract. It's gotten to the point that you have to have a lawyer read that contract before you quit your job to take the new one. The new employer wants too much and can destroy your ability to make a living forever! Your coders must document where the ideas that end up in their code comes from, and somebody has to review this documentation. Evenso, patent sharks lay in wait. I've never worked anywhere that had a good means of preventing the inadvertant inclusion by developers of licensed IP in code. That's a hell of a problem.

If you are having url problems, then you can assume that you are having trademark problems and patent problems. It comes from the idea that "we thought of it first." Usually, everyone thinks of it at the same time.

David Locke

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Permalink Reply by Matt Richards on February 10, 2009 at 7:12pm

Thanks David!

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Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on February 16, 2009 at 7:20pm

You'd end up spending WAY more than $5k if you had to hire lawyers and go to the domain name board to classify them as a squatter.

To be perfectly honest, I think $5000 is about half as much as what I would expect them to ask. I believe that's a fair price (we've purchased 2 domain names in the past).

Amortize the cost of the domain over 3 years and you'll see that what they are asking for a common word (in your industry) is a pretty good deal.

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Permalink Reply by G.C. Hutson on May 28, 2009 at 2:45pm

"Spectrogram" is a common noun, but a unique name nonetheless. The name itself, is possibly trademarkable to your product.

If you have claim to a valid trademark of the name for your product (specifically federal), they could be infringing on your protected trademark.

Thus, "persuading" them to hand it over would be much, much easier.

Is it a "pretty" solution? No. But big corporations do it everyday.

G.C. Hutson
www.sadien.com

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