Cybersquatting Attracts Media Attention
A new report from MarkMonitor claims the top 25 brands from the 2006 Top 100 Interbrand list are the victims of 275,000 cybersquatting cases. This report has been picked up by mainstream news sources such as BusinessWeek, Computerworld and PC Magazine.
MarkMonitor is a privately held firm in the business of selling their service to companies holding trademarks, particularly trademarks associated with powerful and valuable brands. MarkMonitor has developed proprietary algorithms and software to search 134 million domain registry entries on a daily basis.
The report holds some interesting numbers. For example, if the 275,000 examples of cybersquatting are distributed evenly over the top 25 brands, this gives an average of 11,000 cybersquatting sites for each company to deal with. To put this in perspective, Microsoft, one of the top 25 brands in this report, has been successful in curtailing just over 1,000 cybersquatting sites in recent months and currently has four active cases in US courts as well as five active cases in the United Kingdom.
So what is happening to the other 10,000 Microsoft cybersquatting sites? Nothing. WIPO, the arbiter in claims of cybersquatting, reports an increase of 25% in caseload for 2006. Still, that increased caseload consists of 1,823 cybersquatting cases. That’s less than 17% of the sites cybersquatting on Microsoft’s name alone.
What does this mean to domainers? MarkMonitor is in the business of alerting companies to cybersquatting. Mainstream media is starting to pick up on this and is becoming interested in the implications on businesses. Will the increased spotlight result in increased pressure on cybersquatters or is the “mouse” significantly quicker than the “cat” in this case? Will cybersquatters continue to overwhelm companies with both quantity and ever more sophisticated domain tasting schemes or will someone step forward with a usable solution? And would such a solution include companies like Microsoft and Earthlink which themselves squat on millions of non-existent domains by redirecting error searches to PPC-monetized search pages?
good point on the error squatting…google does it too…but it's ok for large companies to do it…we need to bring this point up whenever involved in a squatting case.
Interesting that this was brought to us by the company that lost the Google.de domain name to a cybersquatter
Actually Rob, the .de registry dropped google.de not MarkMonitor.
Didn't MarkMonitor fail to respond to a "transfer-away" request from the .de registry, which resulted in the transfer being approved? (It was only after that, when the .de registry tried to transfer google.de back to Google, that they briefly dropped the domain which was then snapped up by a domainer.)
How about the case google took againt the german owner of gmail.de , they lost!
[...] we’ve reported recently, cybersquatting is attracting increased attention. A report released May 3, 2007 states that it is [...]