Cybersquatting Cases Hit Record In 2008
WIPO has announced that companies and celebrities ranging from Arsenal football club to actress Scarlett Johansson filed a record number of "cybersquatting" cases in 2008 to stop others from profiting from their famous names, brands, and events. The most common business sector in which complaints arose was pharmaceuticals, due to Web sites offering sales of medicines with protected names.
A blog relating to Internet legal issues by Professor John Swinson, University of Queensland
Adsense HTML
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
How should damages be assessed for privacy and cybersecurity breaches
Listen to this podcast where I discuss how damages should be assessed in privacy and cybersecurity lawsuits. The Lawyers Weekly Show host J...
-
The United Nations intellectual property agency (WIPO) is the latest front in the US-China trade war. http://www.theage.com.au/world/sad-am...
-
The issue of content regulation in China was mentioned in this blog last year . In the last few weeks, this issue has once again pushed into...
-
Finally, what is called direct registration of domain names is coming to Australia. See https://www.auda.org.au/statement/australias-interne...
3 comments:
The article that John has based his post around also raised an interesting issue about gTLD's.
"The problem could get worse with new web address endings – known as generic top-level domains (gTLDs) - to be introduced soon by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)."
Back in 1984, an initial set of top level domains were established.
.com
.edu
.gov etc etc
On 26 June 2008, ICANN approved the recommendation of a new gTLD program which would allow companies to register domains under any gTLD.
My mind immediately turned to new domain names that i could potentially cyber-squat on. Here are a few i came up with
www.search.google
www.chat.msn
www.porn.xxx
Just leading on, not really on the issue of cybersquatting, but cybercrime in general, the decision of the Queensland Court of Appeal recently in R v Columbus [2009] QCA 396 involves cyber-muling. It is a recent example of cybercrime, though not really touching on all of the points as it was an appeal against sentence.
Cheers.
It does make me wonder what could happen. People have been able to make a fortune by buying up popular domain names and selling them. With the opening up of a whole new "playing field" so to speak. With the fact that companies and celebrities etc are fighting to protect their names and prevent people profiting from them it will be opening up a huge can of worms.
Post a Comment