Facebook sues TeachBook.com for cybersquatting

All your “book” are belong to us?
Facebook has filed a cybersquatting and trademark infringement lawsuit against TeachBook.com, a social networking site for teachers.
The suit claims the site unfairly capitalizes on the Facebook trademark by using the “book” portion of the mark to evoke the idea of social networking.
According to the complaint, one of TeachBook’s selling points is that many schools ban teachers from using Facebook in order to prevent kids extorting them using personal information.
I don’t know how popular the site is — it doesn’t look like much — but it appears that TeachBook also owns a trademark on its brand.
I doubt this kind of claim would hold up under UDRP rules (unless a “friendly” panelist got the case), which is probably why Facebook has resorted to the US courts.
CourthouseNews.com has a PDF of the complaint and exhibits.

ITU chief snubs ICANN’s Beckstrom

“If your name’s not down, you’re not coming in.”
That’s pretty much the message sent to ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom by the International Telecommunications Union’s secretary general, following his request to attend a top-level ITU policy meeting.
Beckstrom wrote to Hamadoun Toure last month, asking for observer status at October’s ITU Plenipotentiary Conference – the “supreme organ” of ITU policy-making, held every four years.
The idea was that ICANN and the ITU would start to develop a more formal relationship.
In a letter published today, Toure turned him down, noting that the guest-list for the Guadalajara meeting is strictly limited by convention to entities such as national telecoms regulators and UN agencies.

For your information, the Plenipotentiary Conferece, the supreme organ of the ITU, is the highest level of administrative conference for the Union.
…
I regret to inform you that the ITU is unable to respond positively to your request to attend

Ouch.
ICANN and the ITU have a spiky history. It’s well known that the ITU would prefer internet addressing to be handled from Geneva rather than Marina Del Rey. Over the years, it’s occasionally made the odd attempted power grab.
The fact that Beckstrom has been rebuffed is surely more evidence that, for all its flaws, ICANN is still a better place to manage the DNS.
If the head of ICANN can’t even observe the ITU’s top dogs at work, what chance would the rest of us have of being heard?

Microsoft wins Kinect domains, but still doesn’t own kinect.com

Microsoft has successfully recovered two domain names that contain its Kinect games trademark, but kinect.com still belongs to another company.
A National Arbitration Forum UDRP panelist handed Microsoft kinectxbox.com and xbox-kinect.com, which were registered on the eve of Kinect’s launch, calling the registrations “opportunistic bad faith”.
The registrant, located in France, said in his defense that he’d planned to create a fan site for the Kinect, which is an upgrade for the Xbox games console.
But he didn’t get a chance – the domains were registered on June 12, Kinect was announced the following day, and Microsoft had slapped him with a UDRP complaint by June 29.
As I reported back in June, kinect.com is currently registered to an ad agency called CAHG. I’d be surprised if Microsoft hasn’t tried to buy the domain already.
Interestingly, Microsoft, which looks like a client of Melbourne IT’s brand management service, does own kinect.co, but it currently redirects to a Bing search.

We Buy Any Car UDRPs webuyanymotors.com

If you live in the UK, you’ve probably seen the annoying-as-hell (yet consequently effective) WeBuyAnyCar.com commercials on TV.
Now the company is going after the domain webuyanymotors.com, owned by another British company with a similar business model, with a UDRP proceeding.
WeBuyAnyCar has obviously spent a fair bit of money building its brand up recently, but are “car” and “motors” really confusingly similar?
Trying singing along to the commercial using “motors”. It just doesn’t scan properly.

ICANN releases (censored) board briefing docs

ICANN has given an unprecedented glimpse into the workings of its board of directors, with the release of hundreds of pages of staff briefing papers.
But the documents are quite heavily redacted, particularly when it comes to some of the more controversial topics.
The documents show what ICANN staffers told the board in the run-up to the Nairobi and Brussels meetings, dealing with important decisions such as .xxx and internationalized domain names.
The Brussels decision to put .xxx back on the track to approval sees more than its fair share of blacked-out text, but the documents do show that ICANN general counsel John Jeffrey’s recommendations were pretty much in line with how the board eventually voted.
Other topics seeing redaction include the implementation of DNSSEC at the root, the activities of the Internet Governance Forum, and specific discussion of IDN ccTLD delegations.
Some topics are deemed so sensitive that even the titles of the pages have been blacked out. But in at least one case somebody apparently forgot to redact the title from the PDF’s internal bookmarks.
So we know, for example, that a section entitled “Chronological-History-ICM” is deemed entirely unpublishable, even though ICANN has previously published a document with pretty much the same title (pdf).

World of Warcraft player ganks UDRP complainant

An aviation safety consulting firm has lost its UDRP case against a gamer who used its company name for his World of Warcraft guild.
Wyvern Consulting went after wyvern.com, which was registered by its current owner back in 2005.
The registrant said he’d originally registered the name for a possible business venture, which fell through, and then decided to use it for his WoW guild instead.
The National Arbitration Forum panelist found that while Wyvern proved the name was confusingly similar to its common law trademark, and that the registrant lacked legitimate interests in the domain, it had failed to prove bad faith.

Complainant does not have a registered trademark, and offers no proof of consumer confusion or loss of business. Respondent’s proof of its current use is minimal, but the burden is upon Complainant on this issue. Respondent’s use of the disputed domain name as a forum and e-mail service for its World of Warcraft guild does not establish that Respondent registered and used the disputed domain name in bad faith

The domain in question currently appears to be unused, although archive.org shows a WoW guild page back in 2008.

New TLD ownership rules punted to ICANN board

The ICANN board will be asked to untangle the policy mess that currently bans domain name registrars from applying for new top-level domains, after a GNSO working group failed to reach consensus.
The Vertical Integration WG was tasked with figuring out whether registrars should be allowed to own new TLD registries and vice versa, but only managed to reach deadlock.
The GNSO Council is now likely to punt the issue to the ICANN’s September 24-25 retreat, asking the board to consider the issues raised by the WG’s non-committal interim report.
It’s a dismaying case of pass-the-parcel that highlights both the trickiness of the VI problem and the limits of ICANN’s bottom-up policy-making process.
ICANN’s Draft Applicant Guidebook currently says that cross ownership between registrars and new TLD registries should be limited to 2% and that all new TLDs need to be offered to all accredited registrars.
This was in response to fears from some quarters that if a registrar also owned a new TLD registry, it would have an unfair advantage over other registrars, ultimately harming registrants.
The DAGv4 text was an overt, deliberately Draconian placeholder – it would ban all registrars and some registries, as well as making “.brand” TLDs unworkable – designed to force the GNSO find a better solution to the perceived problem.
The WG, which is ongoing, has so far failed to do so, and now seems set to pass the hot potato back from whence it came.
What all this means is that the ICANN board (and, let’s face it, staff) will be forced to assemble a workable VI policy for the first round of new TLD applications from the piecemeal suggestions of the WG; to do over two days or less what the WG failed to do over six months.
What the board will decide remains to be seen, but it could wind up governing the first round of new TLD applications, potentially making it a considerably smaller round.

Some Skype domain names still owned by ex-employees

Oops! A number of Skype’s domain names are still registered in the names of people who no longer work for the company.
The embarrassing oversight was revealed in the company’s S-1 registration statement (huge HTML file), filed yesterday as the company prepares to launch its IPO.
Here’s the relevant section, with my emphasis.

Third parties have registered domain names that contain the Skype trademark without our consent, and a small proportion of the Skype domain names are registered in the names of our former employees rather than in our name. While we are seeking to have these domain names transferred to us, we may not be successful and to the extent that Skype domain names are not under our control in certain countries, it could hinder our marketing efforts, cause confusion to our users and may harm our reputation in those countries if those domain names are used in ways unrelated to our business or in ways with which we would not agree.

The company appears to be having a hard time protecting its brand in the offline world, too.
According to the S-1, News Corp arm BskyB, which runs Sky TV in the UK, has been objecting to Skype’s trademark applications, and it recently manage to block one such application in the EU.
It’s also having problems getting trademark protection in Asia, where others have registered very similar marks.

Cash-for-gold firm aims UDRP at “sucks” site

An Arizona cash-for-gold company has filed a UDRP claim against a gripe site that says it “sucks”.
HBT Investments, which does business at valleygoldmine.com, has filed its claim with WIPO against the owner of valleygoldminesucks.com.
The gripe site isn’t particularly exciting. It’s a blog with two entries, both dating from May 2009 and both primarily questioning the objectivity of an ABC news report.
The registrant probably has a strong defense.
There’s oodles of UDRP precedent protecting “sucks” sites, mainly on the grounds that there’s nothing “confusingly similar” about a domain that treats the trademark owner with contempt.
Valley Goldmine has a Better Business Bureau A+ rating displayed prominently on its web site, so it obviously values its reputation, which is fair enough.
But filing a UDRP against a gripe site does have the unfortunate effect of making it look like you’re trying to stifle free speech.
Valleygoldminesucks.com is, however, the second domain name that appears when one Googles for “valley goldmine”, which is probably more of a concern.

Massive BackCountry.com UDRP case ignores rude typos

Amusingly, a huge 41-domain typosquatting UDRP case just filed by BackCountry.com contains none of the obvious, profane typos.
The claim, apparently filed by an outdoor equipment retailer, covers typos such as backxountry.com, backcountru.com and even backc9untry.com.
It does not include the typo that first occurred to me. You know the one I mean.
That domain exists, and is currently parked with suggestive, adult-oriented ad links.
In fact, none of the 41 domains listed in the National Arbitration Forum claim contain the particular four-letter Shakespearean pun that I’m thinking of.