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Want Beyonce.xxx? JustinBieber.xxx? Forget it

Kevin Murphy, August 22, 2011, 22:06:43 (UTC), Domain Registries

ICM Registry has banned a whole bunch of celebrity names from the new .xxx top-level domain, in order to scupper cybersquatters and opportunistic porn webmasters.
Want to register Beyonce.xxx, AngelinaJolie.xxx, OlsenTwins.xxx, Madonna.xxx, BritneySpears.xxx, KimKardashian.xxx, HalleBerry.xxx or WinonaRyder.xxx?
How about JustinBieber.xxx, BradPitt.xxx, CharlieSheen.xxx, SimonCowell.xxx, GeorgeMichael.xxx, EltonJohn.xxx, VerneTroyer.xxx, DonaldTrump.xxx or OsamaBinLaden.xxx?
Forget it. According to Whois records, you’re out of luck on all counts. They’ve all been reserved by the registry.
These are all among what I’m guessing is at least hundreds – maybe more – of celebrity names that ICM has blocked from ever being registered.
The company won’t say how many celebrities have been afforded this privilege, or how it came up with the list, but it has said in the past that a total of about 15,000 domains have been registry-reserved.
That also includes the names of the world’s capital cities, culturally sensitive strings put forward by a handful of governments, and the “premium” names that ICM plans to auction.
I’m wondering what the cut-off point is for celebrities. How famous do you have to be to get your .xxx blocked by default by the registry? B-List minimum? D-List? What database is ICM using?
American Pie actor Tara Reid just entered Celebrity Big Brother here in the UK, which pretty much means her career is over, and she’s managed to make it to ICM’s reserved list.
While ICM has always said it would help protect personal names from abuse, it’s never been entirely clear about how it would go about it.
Its registry agreement with ICANN has for some time said that “unauthorized registration of personal names” would be forbidden, but there were no real details to speak of.
As I reported last week, its souped-up cybersquatting policy, Rapid Evaluation Service, has a special provision for personal names.
But presumptively blocking a subset of the world’s famous people from .xxx is bound to raise questions in the wider context of the ICANN new gTLD program, however.
As far as I can tell, no corporate trademarks have been given the same rights in .xxx as, say, David Cameron or Barack Obama.
If ICM can protect Piers Morgan’s “brand”, why can it not also protect CNN? Or Microsoft or Coke or Google? None of these brands are registry-reserved, according to Whois.
The trademark lobby will raise this question, no doubt. ICM has its own celebrity Globally Protected Marks List for .xxx, which only applies to individuals, they could argue.
There are some differences, of course.
Celebrities sometimes find they have a harder time winning cybersquatting complaints using UDRP if they have not registered their names as trademarks, which can be quite hard to come by, for example.
(UPDATE: And, of course, they may not qualify for ICM’s sunrise period if they don’t have trademarks, as EnCirca’s Tom Barrett points out in the comments below).
In addition, celebrity skin is a popular search topic on the web, which may give cybersquatters a greater impetus to register their names as domains, despite the high price of .xxx.
Also, if a registry were to reserve the brand names of, say, the Fortune 1000, it would wind up blocking many dictionary or otherwise multi-purpose strings, which is obviously not usually the case with personal names.

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Comments (5)

  1. Tom Barrett says:
    August 22, 2011 at 10:27 pm

    Kevin,
    You mention the primary reason for this at the end. Famous people typically don’t have registered trademarks like brands do. So they are not eligible to block their name during the sunrise period.
    tom barrett
    encirca.com

    Reply
  2. JS says:
    August 23, 2011 at 2:11 am

    Porn star names will most likely be registered “en masse”. Usually no TMs and once developed the traffic should be good.

    Reply
  3. Iliya says:
    August 23, 2011 at 2:01 pm

    Even Bulgarian prime minister name is reserved – boykoborisov.xxx

    Reply
  4. E. Wolf says:
    September 8, 2011 at 9:26 am

    For trademark holders the Sunrise B period is rather costly. Blocking a trademark is at least $200.
    The only goal is not to have a domain name you never asked for and witholding others from using your intellectual property.
    For ICM the Sunrise B period will turn out to be a real cash cow.
    It sounds like: “you have a nice shop and you want to keep it this way? Then pay us and everything will be fine.”

    Reply

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