May 2006
.EU domain names of famous brands up for grabs on eBay
The European Internet naming system was supposed to be different from the .com or .co.uk. At the end of the 4 months grace period, in which owners of trademarks and brand names were given priority to apply for .eu domain name, the .eu system opened up to general registrations.
There is no more need for would-be owners to demonstrate an interest in a name when they pay £35 to register it. Cybersquatters’ favourite rule of "First come, first served." is back as ever before. Enterprising individuals and companies apply for and reserve domain names, either new or expired, that they think someone else will want, either now or in the future.
The system has hardly been the adequate support to the multi million pound Internet industry that it had promised to be. Brussels officials have been accused of "grand manipulation and lax administration", as European companies with trademark names and even some of Europe's biggest capital cities have had potential .eu domains snatched from them in a cyberspace land grab.
The latest domain name grabbing idea is to register variant of trademarks of major brand owner as .eu domain names and offer them for sale on eBay.
Domain names such as Rowntrees.eu, Ask-Jeeves.eu and EuroDisneyParis.eu were on sale on the site for more than £20,000.
A photograph of a Rowntrees Fruit Pastilles packet, one of the brand's best-known products, even featured next to the listing of the Rowntrees.eu domain name.
The search engine and portal launched as Ask Jeeves has been re-branded Ask.com but is still known and referred to worldwide as Ask Jeeves. Ownership and goodwill in the brand Ask Jeeves belongs to Ask.com, Inc. Entitlement of the corresponding .eu domain name is certainly a cause for its concern.
A domain name is just an electronic address. Auctioning domain names on eBay might be legal but registering domain names of famous brands or their variants with a view to making a profit by selling them to the owner of the goodwill in that brand, or their competitor, is not.
The blocking effect of the registration is used as an instrument of fraud to obtain a high price. Although trademark, unfair competition laws and international domain names dispute resolutions may offer some protection, it is often cheaper to buy the domain name from the cybersquatter than it is to sue for its use.
Unlike trademark registration systems that permit similar names to co-exist when the registration cover different goods and services, there is only one registration of a particular name for each top-level domain name irrespective of the goods and services offered under that domain name.
The Brussels based EURiD Registry (European Registry of Internet Domain Names) that launched the system has been fiercely criticized right from the start for being too lenient in its criteria of .eu registrant. Allegedly, there was no verification that .eu registrars were genuine businesses or even ICANN accredited. The end of the “Sunrise period” opened the doors to “free competition” and abuse.
However, even if there had been a strict verification policy, it is not commercially viable for international and famous brand owners to apply for every single variant of their brand combined with every top-level domain name.
It seems that every introduction of new generic top-level domains presents itself as an opportunity to file a new batch of exploitative registrations. According to WIPO, there has been a 20% increase in the number of cybersquatting disputes over the past year. One of the reasons is the recent introduction of these new top-level domains.
There should be robust preventive mechanisms against abusive registration in new gTLDs. Will the alternative procedure offered by EURiD help to solve disputes about .eu domain or will the brand owners be left to fight with the domain grabbers?
Sophie Lachowsky
sophie@briffa.com