WIPO suggests RapidShare might own “rapid” after all

RapidShare has won a UDRP complaint against the owner of rapidpiracy.com, after the WIPO panelist apparently went against recent precedent.
As I’ve been reporting for a while now, RapidShare has been trying to clean up its brand by filing UDRP complaints on domains that contain its trademark.
In pretty much all cases the offending domain hosts a web site containing links to copyrighted material hosted on rapidshare.com and other file-sharing services.
In most cases, the domain also includes the word “rapidshare”, which the company has trademarked.
In July, a WIPO panelist rejected RapidShare’s claim on rapidbay.net, concluding that the words “rapidbay” and “rapidshare” were not sufficiently alike to warrant an “identical or confusingly similar” finding.
Now, a different WIPO panelist has come to the opposite conclusion, finding for the complainant in the case of rapidpiracy.com; “rapidshare” and “rapidpiracy” are apparently confusingly similar.
Acknowledging the precedent could have been “fatal” to RapidShare’s case, Matthew Harris drew a distinction, arguing that “piracy” and “share” are conceptually similar, whereas “bay” was not.

it is not fanciful to suggest the term “rapidpiracy” can be read as involving a conceptual allusion to the Complainants’ mark (perhaps suggesting an illegal version of the Complainants’ services).

He backed this argument by pointing to the fact that there were three references to RapidShare on the first page of rapidpiracy.com, before the complaint was filed.

In short, an obvious inference from this content is that the Respondent intended the Domain Name to be understood as alluding to the Complainants’ mark.

Harris noted that WIPO guidelines say that panelists should not take into account the contents of a web site in order to determine whether the domain name is similar to a trademark, but he had an excuse.

The test is not of similarity between businesses or websites. It involves a comparison between mark and domain name only. However, that does not mean that the content of the website cannot in some cases provide a pointer as to how Internet users will perceive a domain name that in turn might inform the relevant comparison.

(Domain Name Wire has previously noted that Harris has a record of “questionable” decisions.)
He concluded:

So do these factors provide sufficient similarity in this case? Bearing in mind that this is a low threshold test and in the absence of argument to the contrary, the Panel ultimately concludes that the Complainants have satisfied that test. The Complainants have only just crossed the threshold and in doing so they were given a helping hand by the Respondent; but they have crossed it nevertheless.

In my humble opinion there’s no doubt that rapidpiracy.com were a bunch of scoundrels, but I can’t help but wonder whether UDRP was the right place to address the problem.
Yet the precedent has been set; RapidShare does have some claim on the word “rapid” under UDRP, despite its lack of a trademark.
What this means for the UDRP case against rapid.org, which is also in the business of helping people share copyrighted material, remains to be seen. I’m told that case has been assigned the same panelist.

2 Comments Tagged: matthew harris, rapid.org, rapidbay.net, rapidpiracy.com, rapidshare, udrp, wipo

.CO landrush auctions could top $10 million

The ongoing .co landrush auctions could finish up raising more than $10 million for .CO Internet, according to some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations.
My spreadsheet of reported landrush auction sales currently has 194 rows, based on registry reports and the odd unreported sale that Mike Berkens has been able to dig up.
These sales total $869,599, for an average of $4,482 per domain. Multiply that average by 2,523, which is the number of domains that were originally headed to auction, and you get to $11.3 million.
That may well be an unreliable estimate, of course, for any number of reasons.
For instance, .CO Internet is not reporting sales of porn-themed domains, or domains that may have UDRP issues. These domains could possibly have lower average sales prices.
The registry may also not be reporting other results, such as auctions that wound up with only one bidder for whatever reason, which could also drag down the average.
However, it seems that so far UDRP-risky domains or typos of popular generic domains (such as some of the typos of numerical .coms popular in Asia) have been among the big hitters.
AutoGlass.co, for example, appears to have slipped under the registry’s radar, and has been reported sold for $53,000. AutoGlass is a well-known brand here in the UK. I’ll be interested in seeing who bought it.
If these big prices hold true for other unreported sales of domains with possible trademark issues it could actually raise the average sales price.
Either way, it’s clearly been a successful auction so far.

5 Comments Tagged: .co, .co internet, auctions, landrush

T.co to be ubiquitous by Christmas

Twitter is planning on rolling out its t.co URL shortening service to all users by the end of the year, according to a company mailshot this week.
The company received the uber-short domain as part of .CO Internet’s Founders Program, probably the new registry’s biggest marketing coup to date.
Twitter intends to wrap all links inside shortened t.co URLs, and will check their intended destination pages against a list of known malware sites before users are forwarded.
Twitter told users in an email:

You will start seeing these links on certain accounts that have opted-in to the service; we expect to roll this out to all users by the end of the year. When this happens, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL.

For the branding of the .co namespace, this is obviously good news. Twitter handles something like 65 million tweets per day, many of which contain links. All will now carry the .co domain.

1 Comment Tagged: .co, .co internet, t.co, twitter

Go Daddy files for patent on available domain ads

Go Daddy has applied for a US patent on a system that automatically inserts available domain names into banner ads based on the dynamic content of a web page.
The application “Generating online advertisements based upon available dynamic content relevant domain names” was filed in February 2009 and published today.
The patent would cover a way to analyze the content of a web page, perhaps using image identification technology, then generate keywords and check for available domain names to put in the ad.
Instead of a standard Go Daddy banner, visitors to a web page would be shown a custom ad offering an available or aftermarket domains relevant to the content of the page.
The application also seems to cover an API whereby an advertising network, such as Google, would also be able to offer available domains via Adsense.

2 Comments Tagged: advertising, go daddy, google, patents

Local news scrapes barrel with Whois lookup

“Local man and 300,000 others killed in earthquake”.
You’ve seen the headlines. Local news operations will go to crazy lengths in order to put a local spin on international news.
This angle is new to me. The Province, a newspaper in British Columbia, Canada, yesterday managed to localize a hostage situation over 2,300 miles away in Maryland entirely because the gunman used a BC-based domain registrar.

The gunman identified as the suspect in an unfolding hostage situation at the Discovery Channel offices in Silver Spring, Maryland, uses a Burnaby-based company to host his website.
The suspect, identified in media reports as James Jay Lee, has a website named savetheplanetprotest.com. A Whois.com search shows the website is registered to a man by the same name and lists a Burnaby P.O. box as is [sic] address.

The registrar in question is DotEasy.com. It offers Whois privacy services at said PO Box. Unsurprisingly, the company had no comment.
The original The Province headline was “Gunman holding hostages at US Discovery Channel has tenative [sic] BC links”.
Links? A nutter registered a domain name. If all reporters followed this logic, the Scottsdale Times would be the busiest newspaper on the planet.

2 Comments Tagged: discovery channel, doteasy, the province

Five killer TLDs nobody wants (and five rubbish ones)

Not including the incumbents, there are roughly 130 known new top-level domain applicants at the moment, covering everything from music to sport to health.
While several would-be TLDs, such as .gay and .eco, are known to have multiple applicants, there are some no-brainer strings that so far no company has staked a claim on.
Here’s five, off the top of my head.

.blog
Apparently there are something like 400 million active blogs on the internet today. And that’s just in the English language. I’ll take 1% of that, thanks.
.sex/.porn
We may already have .xxx by the time the first application round opens, but that’s no reason to prevent the porn industry taking its fate into its own hands and applying for either of these strings.
Both of these potential TLDs are category killers, moreso than .xxx. According to Google’s keyword tool, [sex] and [porn] each get 24.9 million searches per month, compared to 20.4 million for [xxx].
Yes, it will add even more defensive registrations costs, but it could be run on a cheap-as-chips basis, with free grandfathering, and without the expensive policy oversight body that they all seem to hate so much.
.sucks
The only UDRP-proof TLD. No sunrises, no trademark worries, just tens of thousands of disgruntled former employees happily slandering away.
That’s the theory, anyway. To be more mercenary, this is the one TLD guaranteed to make millions in defensive registrations alone.
Esther Dyson said she liked the idea back in 2000, and I agree with her. The internet needs a renewed dose of anarchic freedom of speech.
.poker
Online poker is worth billions. The term [poker] attracts far more interest than [casino], some 20 million searches per month, according to Google.
The value of the landrush auctions alone would be enough of an incentive for a registry to apply for .poker. Registration fees could also be set pretty high.

And, for balance, five rubbish TLDs.
Again, I’m not talking about guaranteed flops that have already been announced (.royal anyone?), but rather the TLDs that appear attractive at first look, but would, in my humble opinion, almost certainly fail hard.

.book
Sure, every year something like 400,000 books are published in the UK and US, but how many of them really get marketed to the extent that they need their own web site? Very few, I suspect.
And if you’re planning on using the TLD to sell books, good luck trying to train the world out of the Amazon mindset.
.kids
A legal nightmare, requiring a bloated policy oversight body to make sure all content is kid-friendly, which is pretty much impossible when nobody can even agree what a kid is.
You need look no further than the spectacularly unsuccessful government-mandated .kids.us effort to see what a waste of time a .kids would be. It has fewer domains than .arpa.
Still, it kept the politicians happy.
.news
A smaller market than you’d think. Google News only sources from about 25,000 publications, and only 4,500 of those are in English. How many will want to make the switch to a new TLD?
I’d say a .news TLD would struggle to hit six figures.
.secure
No, it isn’t. This is the internet.
A .secure TLD would be a PR nightmare from launch day to its inevitable firey death six months later.
.any-fad-technology
Back in 2000, there was an application for .wap. Really. It almost makes .mobi look like a good idea.
Pretty much no technology is immune from this rule. You can’t build a sustainable business on a string that’s likely to be tomorrow’s Betamax. Even the humble DVD has a shelf life.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, new TLDs

Nokia considers new TLD application

Is Nokia planning to add its name to the list of “.brand” new top-level domain applicants?
That’s the intriguing possibility that emerged during a conference call of ICANN’s vertical integration working group yesterday.
Nokia working group representative Tero Mustala said, “our company is considering the possibilities to apply for a new gTLD”.
The revelation came as one of the disclosure statements that each participant was obliged to make, and should probably not be taken as an official company position.
As far as I know, this is the first time that the mobile phone giant has been connected to a new TLD bid. But is it a .brand? Unknown.
Nokia is an old hand at TLD applications, being among the over a dozen companies that financed the successful .mobi sponsored TLD application back in 2005.
In the 2000 “test-bed” round, it applied for .mas, .max, .mid, .mis, .mobi, .mobile, .now and .own but failed on technological grounds.
Under the new TLD application process, unsuccessful 2000 applicants get an $86,000 credit towards their new application, if they apply for the same string(s). That’s not an amount of money Nokia would care too much about, obviously.
There have been very few publicly disclosed .brand applications. Canon was the first and loudest. A couple of other companies, such as IBM, have been dropping hints.

3 Comments Tagged: .brand, ICANN, new TLDs, nokia, vertical integration

.travel domains to be opened to all

Attention domainers. The .travel registry wants your business.
Tralliance has become the latest of the sponsored top-level domain registries to decide it needs to loosen the shackles of sponsorship and target a more general user base.
Its sponsor, The Travel Partnership Corporation, has quietly changed the policies governing .travel in order to substantially liberalize the namespace.
I say quietly, because the policy changes were published August 20 and there does not appear to have been any coverage yet beyond TTPC’s own site and this press release from a registrar today.
The new policy document contains only two small changes, but they have big implications.
The first is to add a new category of approved registrant to the existing list, which includes hotels, airlines and so on. The new category is:

Creators and providers of travel and tourism products, services and content.

This seems to be general enough to exclude nobody, especially when one puts it in the context of the second big change that TTPC is proposing, which seems to allow domain parking.
Currently, the registry policies state that all .travel domains need to resolve to active travel-related web sites or email addresses. That restriction is to be dumped entirely.
In fact, the word “restriction” has been replaced with “incentive”. This is from the redlined policy doc:

The Registry has the discretion to develop restrictions incentives for on use of any domain name, such restrictions incentives to apply to any name registration that occurs after such restrictions come into effect. Restrictions may include, but are not limited to, a requirement to develop a website that uses the registered name, to ensure that each registered name resolves to a working website

No such incentives are included, but I’d guess that they may end up looking a little like the recent moves by .jobs and .co to engage in joint marketing deals with companies willing to promote the TLD.
The upshot of all this is that it appears that .travel domains will soon be close to unrestricted. Registrants will still have to undergo a one-time authentication process, but that’s looking increasingly like a formality.
The policy changes take effect September 20. It doesn’t look like they would disenfranchise anybody, except perhaps those who considered .travel an exclusive club, so I doubt there’ll be the same kind of outcry that .jobs recently saw.
The .travel domain launched in October 2005. As of April 2010, it had 47,338 active registrations.

4 Comments Tagged: .jobs, .travel, landrush, sTLDs, the travel partnership corporation, tralliance, ttpc

VeriSign antitrust case heading to District Court

The Coalition For ICANN Transparency will have its day in court, after VeriSign this week asked for a “speedy resolution” to the five-year-old antitrust case.
In a filing (pdf) with the Northern California District Court on Wednesday and in an accompanying SEC document, the company said it want it wants the case heard on its merits.
According to CFIT lawyer Bret Fausett, VeriSign had the option to refer the case to the Supreme Court after losing a motion to dismiss on appeal last month.
VeriSign had until October 9 to make its mind up, but evidently did not need that long.
This is the meat of the motion:

On July 9, 2010, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an amended opinion in this case and remanded the case to this Court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.” The Ninth Circuit spread the mandate on July 19. VeriSign, Inc. respectfully requests that the Court schedule a case management conference at its earliest convenience to discuss plans for a speedy resolution to the case.

The case is important because if VeriSign loses it could lead to the company losing its lucrative monopoly on the .com and .net registries.
While it wants a speedy resolution, analysts are not so hopeful. JP Morgan believes: “All together, the motions in the trial, discovery, trial, and potential appeal could take years to complete.”
The analyst also notes that pretrial discovery will likely lead to a definitive answer to the question: who the hell is CFIT anyway?

1 Comment Tagged: cfit, coalition for icann transparency, verisign

.jobs landrush beauty contest opens

Employ Media has made a request for proposals from companies that want to apply for generic .jobs domain names, to predictable criticism.
ICANN recently permitted the company to start selling non-“company name” .jobs domains, and the RFP is the first phase of its plan.
It basically constitutes a landrush process, albeit one that makes .cn registrations seem laissez faire, and in which you don’t actually get to “own” any domain names at the end.
To apply, companies have to present Employ Media with a business plan and a list of their desired domains, among other information.
The registry appears to be reluctant to talk about the money side of things, other than the non-refundable $250 application fee.
The closest thing in the RFP to an outstretched palm appears to be this paragraph:

Employ Media’s role is to make .JOBS domain names available to those interested in serving the needs of the International HR management community as set forth in the .JOBS Charter. Describe how your proposal will contribute to Employ Media’s role in a manner that reflects the value (financial, services or otherwise) of the proposed .JOBS domains.

The CollegeRecruiter.com blog, and some reader comments, suggest that the registry has been asking potential applicants for “creative” ideas, including revenue sharing deals, and then threatening legal action when such overtures are recounted in public fora.
CollegeRecruiter’s CEO Steven Rothberg was one of the leading opponents of the .jobs liberalization plan.
The only organization I’m aware of that is on record intending to respond to the RFP is the DirectEmployers Association, which intends to apply for thousands of generic domains under its controversial universe.jobs plan.

1 Comment Tagged: .jobs, collegerecruiter.com, directemployers association, employ media, ICANN, landrush