Domain Name Tips: Dealing With Cybersquatting

The business world has always been tough in the United States, but in the age of the Internet, there are all kinds of new complications that most people had never really imagined. This is especially true for those who have been around for a while. The youngest generation of the workforce might be more familiar with the politics of online interactions, but those who came of age when college papers were still written on typewriters might not be able to navigate this brave new world quite so easily.



One issue that many businesses will face is the challenge of creating a website, or even revamping an old one. Few things are more crucial than making sure you get the online part of your business running right, but the task is easier said than done. But before you can even put up the website, you need to register its domain name, the part of the URL that comes before the "www." and the ".com". This seems easy enough, but fist of all there are rules to what makes a successful domain name, and second of all, sometimes you will go to register a domain only to find that it has already been taken! Few things can be more frustrating. After spending so much time agonizing over the URL of your website – trying to make it short enough, snappy enough, easy to spell enough – you discover that the one that you finally decided on cannot even be used by you! It is back to the drawing board, to start from scratch and think of a new idea.



Or is it? In certain cases, if you had a close second backup, it might be just as easy to register that URL instead to save yourself the hassle. But in certain cases, there is no easy alternative. If your dream domain has been registered to another business, blog, or service website that is legitimate, unfortunately you are going to have to move on. When you run a joint called Joey’s Pizza, you have to figure that joeyspizza.com might very well be taken. You cannot sue the guy two states over who shares your first name and your passion for a good pie. But in certain very specific cases, the person who owns the domain name that you want could be engaging in cybersquatting. This is a federal crime in which a company buys up URLs that they know specific companies are going to want to purchase (often based on trademarked words) and then tries to sell it back to them at an inflated price. Buying and selling different website names is not illegal in itself, but if it is truly exploitative, you might be able to make a case and force the owners to give up the site. For example, if you are the manufacturer of a popular brand of organic drinks called product called Kombucha Kickers, and then you find that the URL kombuchakickers.com is taken, you can investigate who has decided to purchase it. If it is simply a company looking to sell it back to you at a huge profit, you might be able to make the cybersquatting case.



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