03 December 2012

Be Vigilant in Protecting Domain Names

Business Owners Need to be Vigilant in Protecting Their Domain Names - Press Release - Digital Journal: " . . . Disputes can arise when one business registers a particular domain name and another business subsequently attempts to obtain a trademark in the same words. Obviously, the company owning the domain name would like to object to the trademark application of the second company and protect its "rights" in the domain name. However, the first company can only protect the domain name, and stop the second company from registering the trademark, if it can show it has priority in the mark - meaning it "used" the mark first. . . . but other circuits and Patent and Trademark Office decisions have concluded that simply registering a domain does not create trademark rights. In fact, an often cited Ninth Circuit decision - Brookfield Communications v. West Coast Entertainment- has expressly stated that registration of a domain name does not by itself constitute "use" for the purpose of establishing trademark priority, even if the company intends to eventually use the domain commercially. This particular proposition was also recently recognized in an Arizona federal case in which a company had registered a domain name but still hadn't created a website - the domain name was simply used as a "splash page" filled with third-party advertisements. . . ."
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/955998#ixzz2DqfFuhA1

ReadWrite – What Verisign's New Contract With ICANN Means For ...
By Christina Ortiz
Verisign, the operator for .com domain registry, has renewed its six-year contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names (ICANN) with the U.S. Commerce Department's blessing. Under the terms of the new contract, Verisign is not ...
ReadWrite

DomainIncite - Domain Name News & Opinion: "Here’s my initial take on the winners and losers of this new arrangement. Domain investors Volume .com registrants are of course the big winners here. A couple of dollars a year for a single .com is pretty insignificant, but when you own tens or hundreds of thousands of names… Mike Berkens of Most Wanted Domains calculated that he’s saved $170,000 $400,000 over the lifetime of the new .com deal, . . . The other big constituency of volume registrants are the brand owners who spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year maintaining defensive registrations — mostly in .com — that they don’t need. Microsoft, for example, owns over 91,000 domain names, according to DomainTools. I’d hazard a guess that most of those are defensive and that most are in .com. . . ."

VeriSign falls after new .com registry deal
MarketWatch
Shares of VeriSign, the operator of the .com domain name registry for the World Wide Web, fell as much as 14% on Friday morning after its ability to raise prices was limited as part of its deal with the U.S. government to keep operating the registry ...

Blizzard nabs Project Blackstone domain name
games.on.net
It's time for a round of the Internet's favourite game, Ill-informed Speculation! Today's contestants have quite a puzzle before them: Blizzard, the World of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo publisher known to be working on a new top-secret MMO project ...

games.on.net

Blizzard registers “Project Blackstone” domain
PC Gamer Magazine
Blizzard Entertainment has registered the domain name ProjectBlackstone.com, effective November 26. It's fairly common to hear about this sort of thing with Blizzard. Going all the way back to World of Warcraft's Burning Crusade expansion, we've been...

PC Gamer Magazine

Blizzard Registers Mysterious Domain Name - Escapist Magazine
Bayoubuzz (subscription)
Does Titan have a new name, or is Blizzard working on yet another unannounced project? In an industry where projects are worked on for months or even years before we hear anything about them, internet domain registrations are sometimes our first hint ...

Web domain seizures warrant due process
San Francisco Chronicle
But while it's hard to feel much sympathy for counterfeiters, the U.S. government is going to have to find a smarter and more precise way of targeting them besides domain name seizures. Though Congress passed legislation in 2008 that gave law ...

Business financing is offered
Detroit Free Press
Under the current contract, VeriSign was guaranteed four price increases of up to 7% each on domain name registrations. VeriSign sought a similar guarantee as part of the contract renewal, but the Commerce Department rejected it. The new contract ...

Blizzard Registers 'Project Blackstone' Domain Name
Just a few days ago, Blizzard registered the ProjectBlackstone.com domain name. According to Fusible, the previous holder was a Texan man who let the domain name expire in 2011, allowing Blizzard to swoop in and snatch it up.The WHOIS ...
News Tom's Hardware

How To Find A Great Startup Domain Name | TechWench.com
By GuestAcct
You are going to need to use the following steps in finding a great start-up domain name when there are a lot of web domains for sale. The first step is to.

Verisign can't regularly boost .com registration prices - Nov. 30, 2012: "The company renewed its contract with the U.S. Commerce Department on Friday, but under the terms of the new deal, Verisign will not be able to continue its practice of frequently raising prices by as much as 7% -- something Verisign did in four out of the six years covered by its last deal. Currently, registration prices sit at $7.85 per year. The Commerce Department will need to approve any price hikes on .com registration through 2018, which it only plans to do for "extraordinary expenses related to security or stability threats." Shares of Verisign (VRSN) fell by 15% on the news. Verisign has been operating the .com and .net top-level domain registries since 2000 under an agreement with the Domain Name System overseer, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. But Verisign's contract renewal was strongly opposed by the Internet Commerce Association, which represents website owners. ICA claimed that Verisign's price hikes were arbitrary and not done out of economic necessity. The group pointed out that Verisign charges just $5.86 for the far less-used .net domain name, even though both domains use the same infrastructure and have similar operational costs."

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