On CyberSquatters and Whois Privacy
There have been many recent public comments that consider all domainers cybersquatters. I have been meaning to comment on that – as you might imagine I do not quite agree. But here’s an article, where I could not hold off commenting on – this time against whois privacy.
On CNET the lawyer Doug Isenberg tells us that ICANN needs to clamp down on domain name abuse. Of course he also had to use the “Cybersquatter” word: Today, cybersquatters have rebranded themselves as “domainers.” Mr. Isenberg also is a panelist for WIPO.
Some rumors and public data lead me to believe, that the author of the article, Doug Isenberg, is also the owner of the domain “couponcodes.com”. So let’s take a closer look: On DomainTools.com, we found an old whois record showing the following owner (from March 2006):
DOLESCO LLC
5310 South Trimble Road
ATLANTA, Georgia 30342
United StatesRegistered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: COUPONCODES.COM
Created on: 06-Dec-99
Expires on: 06-Dec-07
Last Updated on: 16-Jan-05Administrative Contact:LLC, DOLESCO doug@isenberg.net
5310 South Trimble Road
ATLANTA, Georgia 30342
United States
404 256 4334 Fax –
Alexa also lists him as the owner of the site, if you seach for his main site, GigaLaw.com:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=Gigalaw.com
Today the whois of this domain is protected with Whois Privacy, which he also mentions in his article: http://www.iwhois.com/couponcodes.com
Also “couponcodes.com” seems confusingly similar to “couponcode.com“, which also is a registered trademark:
The domain currently is serving ads from SiteLauncher.
Whois privacy also helps to protect site owners from receiving spam, so of course this is a double-edged sword. If there is a valid legal complaint, any registrar will lift the whois privacy veil, so I do not really see the big problem here.
[via CNET/News.com / DomainNameWire]
Good work. I look forward to him explaining this to be measured against what we wrote.
Doug’s registered couponcodes.com since 1999, as you’ll notice. And I’m sure he didn’t mean to brand all domainers as cybersquatters.
However, it’s getting harder to tell “who is” and “who isn’t” with some of these registrars involved in such “shenanigans”.
The TM for couponcode.com was not applied for til 2005-2006. Itll be hard to argue that couponcodes.com is infringing on their TM and might even be considered generic.
Dan,
Thank you for your comments.
I agree with your comments in general, the lines are getting blurry. Even more so it is important to differentiate between who does what and not to generalize. Hence the idea to point out that Mr. Isenberg was using whois privacy himself (if he is still the owner of the domain).
Re: the trademark
If this was to come down to a dispute, this wouldn’t be the first case where a trademark holder has ‘more’ right to a domain – at least according to WIPO. I’d actually like to see Mr. Isenberg on the panel on this one, even though he might be too involved to participate.
/Frank
[...] On CyberSquatters and Whois Privacy [...]
[...] On CyberSquatters and Whois Privacy [...]
[...] On CyberSquatters and Whois Privacy [...]