Dear FSB: Both the name and URL of my company’s website were
registered with a domain name registration company. After more than
five years they have sold the URL for my company’s name to another
person who now runs it in competition to mine. Do I have copyright to
this name and URL?- Garry Whitfield, San Francisco, Calif.
Dear Garry:
Unless you have a trademark on the business name, there’s little you
can do, according to Christine Jones, general counsel for Web hosting
company GoDaddy.com, in Scottsdale, Ariz.“The
first thing you have to distinguish is between copyright and
trademark,” Jones said. In brief, copyright protects the creators of
“original works of authorship” such as literary and musical works. A
trademark, on the other hand, is a word, name, symbol or device used to
distinguish a particular good from others in the market.“The question to ask is if you need a trademark to the name and URL,” Jones said.
If your business name is a registered trademark, you can file a domain name dispute under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Policy which is governed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
Source: Fortune/CNN
Further reading here.
Help, Fortune Magazine Doesn’t Have Clue About Cybersquatting
Even Fortune Magazine struggles with the definition and elements of cybersquatting. In a recent article titled “Help, a competitor bought my Web domain!”, Fortune writer Jennifer Lawinski, who supposedly quotes Christine Jones, general counsel for Web hosting company GoDaddy.com, gets it egregiously wrong by misinforming the readers:
1. Repeatedly stating that you must have a registered trademark to file and prevail under the UDRP.
2. Mysteriously referencing copyright law, which has nothing to do with cyber-squatting.
3. Stating that the registrant must have “the express purpose of competing with you” in order to prevail under the UDRP.
4. Stating that you automatically lose under the UDRP if you let your domain name registration expire, even if you have a registered trademark.
5. Mysteriously referencing patent law as somehow related to the UDRP