A Google domain name is lying on the ground. An IT guy walks past it. A friend asks: "Didn't you see the Google domain name there?" The IT guy replies: "I thought I saw something, but I must've imagined it. If there had been a Google domain on the ground, someone would've picked it up."
For anyone unfamiliar, this is a clever riff on a classic economics joke about the Efficient Market Hypothesis [1].
"Two economists are walking down the street and one of them notices what appears to be a $20 bill (or a $100 bill—the monetary amounts vary) on the sidewalk. “It’s not a real $20 bill,” the other economist declares. “If it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up off the sidewalk already.”
Except the $20 bill in this case is a $-10 bill (or whatever the domain name costs), as there is no profit to be made by registering a top company's trademark as a domain name.
For the curious, .soy seems to be one of the more expensive TLDs. It's $34.54 at Gandhi, $25.98 at Namecheap, $35.99 at Network Solutions, and $20 at Goggle. (I also tried at Bluehost, HostGator, and Godaddy, but none of them seem to even offer .soy).
It looks like netflix.soy was registered via Google, so that would be a $-20 bill.
A domain can be either resold to another third party or could be sold to the trademark owner itself. You might reach a price agreement that brings you some money and costs the trademark owner less than getting a lawyer involved.
No there isn't. Companies won't pay you money for having cybersquatted on their obvious trademark. You'll lose the domain flat out through UDRP.
The best outcome that can happen to you if you find yourself in such a situation is that you relinquish the domain name for free and nothing further comes from it.
Arbitration through UDRP is expensive, both in terms of process costs and employee time. A reasonable company would probably pay more than registration costs to avoid it.
You're underestimating how much value there is to companies in setting precedent on defending their trademark with an easy and practically guaranteed win. Companies need to proactively defend their trademark when it's being infringed upon or they risk losing it, and this is a really easy way to defend it.
Now this a valid reason to give your kid the surname of a brand. To get rich quick. Too bad that this also limits employment options in the long run (can you imagine Google to work for Amazon?)
>you also need to have used it in business already.
What is this based on? Because surely I have the right to own mylastname.suffix without being a business even if someone decides to make a business that bears my family name.
He bought mikerowesoft.com though, not microsoft.soy. It would not have ended the way it did if he'd bought the latter. His case was a lot less clear cut than a blatant exact string match on an unambiguous trademark. Also, Mike Rowe is actually his name; Netflix is not this guy's name.
I think Nissan.com is more illustrative -- it was a guy named Nissan[1] who had an actual computer business in his name and got to keep it away from Nissan Motors, but now his site has a lot more to do bragging about his fight with the motor company than actual computer stuff.
[1] Hebrew/Israeli name usually transliterated as "Nisan"
Took a quick look at the case. I'm guessing some corp lawyer, maybe even general counsel, didn't have enough "real work" to do and needed to make a name for himself. Then it became a giant d* measuring contest.
Source: Went to law school. Never practiced though.
They got bad self-serving advice from lawyers. A lawyer doesn't get paid much if all they do is write up a contract for a private agreement to buy a domain, but they get paid a lot if the disagreement goes to trial instead.
A little anecdote. I actually had this exact situation happen to me when I was a kid.
I was walking in a crowded street just outside a shopping center and there where a bunch of $50 bills being blowed by the wind. No one was paying any attention to them so I picked one of them up. You can imagine my surprise when I realised that they were real.
All in all it ended up to be roughly $3000 and my mum took the money to the police station. No one claimed it and a few months later we got to keep it.
I don't doubt google would attempt to do this, and probably win simply by being able to out resource an individual who registered the domain, however, my limited understanding of trademark law is this wouldn't necessarily be a valid claim.
My understanding is trademarks are a protection against consumer confusion, so as long as companies aren't selling similar products or services, or competing in the same geography there isn't a problem. This is difficult with google, but a non-tech scuba company operating under google.scuba or googlescuba.com wouldn't necessarily infringe on google the tech company unless they're actively doing something to make consumer believe they're dealing with google the tech company.
Google is difficult with it's large breadth of interests, but for most tech companies this is likely more about exploiting flaws with the legal system by out resourcing opponents more than legitimate claims (thinking the oracles, salesforces, dells, Intels, etc).
IANAL but I'm pretty sure those examples could still be trademark infringement. Since Google is a global company and brand, someone could easily assume since your site is called google.scuba or googlescuba.com, you are in some way affiliated with or endorsed by Google. Perhaps you'd be OK if you made it very clear that wasn't the case, but I wouldn't want to bet on it.
I don't know what legal relationship it has to US trademark law, if any, but I've heard ICANN has its own sort of arbitration process for domain squatting disputes.
So… these aren't accessible without specially configured DNS, right? Given that the point of domains is to let people get to your site, a TLD only accessible after reconfiguring your computer to use a little-known DNS competitor seems worth a hell of a lot less than $19,000.
