Cyber Squatting and Domain Speculation †A Global perspective :: Argumentative Persuasive Internet Essays

Cyber Squatting and Domain Speculation – A Global perspective Introduction and definitions ‘Cyber squatting’ has become an increasing source of annoyance and problem in the internet world. Apart from some of the other issues such as internet security, hacking and frauds, which usually occur after going online, ‘Cyber Squatting’ is the first major problem faced by any company well before they even setup an internet web site. Before moving on to the various issues, it is often unclear of what ‘Cyber Squatting’ actually is. Simply put, cyber squatting means the registration of a domain name in violation of a trademark or business name or other intellectual property of its owners. This includes the registration of a name deceptively similar to such business name or trademark. Usually, domain squatters register these domains before the company does and offer these domain names to such business houses at a premium 1. U.S. Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Judge Berle M. Schiller defined cyber-squatting or cyber-piracy as the "deliberate, bad-faith, and abusive registration of Internet domain names in violation of the rights of trademark owners.† 2. Using this definition put forward by Judge Berle some of the major cyber squatting problems, that directly violate the trademark of corporation, has been solved. But another increasing problem is the issue of Domain Speculation. Another practice that sometimes, and misleadingly, is called cyber-squatting is domain speculation: the registering of domain names based not on recognized brands but on generic terms (e.g. crocodile.com, homes-for-sale.com, cheapflowers.com). Speculators register generic domain names in the hope that a company will wish to buy a particular name for its own commercial use2. Current problems Going back to the problem of cyber squatting we can refer to a much earlier case in China. This was the time when Chinese corporations did not enjoy the protection of the law against cyber squatters. In the past few years, many cyber squatters registered the names of many famous Chinese companies in domain registrars in countries such as the United States. As a result, these Chinese companies were forced to pay large sums to 'reclaim' their domain names. For example, cyber squatters registered the domain name 'kelon.com'. The Chinese company that owned the trademark 'KELON' paid RMB1 million to reclaim the domain name from the cyber squatter3 In this case we can see that the only way Chinese companies could resolve the issue was to either pay large sums of money to the domain squatter or just get another domain.