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Win the web name game Avoid domain name conflict with a few simple steps 27 May 2005 - When Apple recently won a high-profile adjudication against a small UK company in a dispute about the ownership of a domain name, the decision provided food for thought for businesses trading or looking to set up shop on the internet. The case centred on the registration by CyberBritain Holdings of the www.itunes.co.uk internet domain. Despite the domain having been registered two months before the launch of Apple's own site, www.itunes.com, Nominet - the UK body responsible for ruling on such disputes - concluded the computer giant had brand rights and found in its favour. So does this mean that the principle of "finders keepers" does not apply to domain name registrations? It is certainly finders keepers at the outset. All that has to be done is to check that the selected name is still available, and then register it. Things get more complicated when the successful registrant receives a notice from another party alleging a better claim to the domain name. Where an amicable agreement is not reached, matters may proceed to court or be decided under a dispute resolution policy. Dispute procedure Nominet rules on disputes concerning .uk registrations. To succeed, anyone applying for the transfer of the registration must show they have similar or identical rights to the registered domain name: for example, a trademark or established trading name. They must also show the registration was "abusive", by demonstrating, for instance, that the domain was registered in a bid to sell it to the complainer. In the Apple case, the domain name was handed over because of CyberBritain's "bad faith" in using it merely to redirect users to another of its sites, having previously tried to sell the registration to Apple for £50,000. For top-level domains, such as .com, the dispute procedure is governed by the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which is administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The essential points to consider here are whether the domain name in question is identical or similar to the complainant's trademark; whether the company that has registered the domain has a legitimate interest in the name; and whether there is a suggestion of bad faith behind the registration. If the expert finds for the complainant on all three points, the domain name will be transferred. Although both these procedures are used widely, they are not law and occasionally the courts have departed from their approach. Most notably, this happened in the "sucks" cases, where a well-known, trademarked name was registered with the suffix "sucks" in a bid to undermine the relevant company. The practice under the UDRP has been to order the handover of such sites to their respective trademark owners, but a US court recently declined to do this. It argued the site, as registered, was not a commercial one and so could not be said to be infringing the trademark owner's rights. This differing viewpoint from that under the UDRP can lead to confusion. Protecting chosen names Although the element of bad faith meant CyberBritain Holdings lost its right to the itunes registration, it raised the question of what companies should consider when setting up a website. How can they protect their chosen name, especially when they may be unaware of new services that have yet to be launched? It is important to carefully consider the name being selected and conduct a search to ensure it is available. Think about why the name has been chosen - does it relate to a company product, to an established trading name, or its own trademark? Another useful precaution is to conduct a search on the public registers to check the chosen name does not conflict with any marks already registered at the Patent Office or company names registered at Companies House. Although a match here will not necessarily rule out the domain name, it will highlight any potential clashes. By following these simple steps, companies should be able to safeguard their domain name registration and strengthen their position in the event of an Apple-type challenge. Gillian Cameron is a partner and IP specialist with corporate lawyers Maclay Murray & Spens www.patentoffice.gov.uk www.companieshouse.gov.uk www.computerweekly.com/articles/article.asp?liArticleID=138634&liArticleTypeID=13&liCategoryID=2&liChannelID=28&liFlavourID=1&sSearch=&nPage=1 Nominet consults on international domain names Matt Loney On Monday Nominet launched a consultation paper to canvass opinion on expanding the domain name system beyond the limits imposed when the Internet was designed "mostly by English speakers". Domain names within the .co.uk domain are currently limited to 37 core symbols -- the letters A-Z, the ten digits and the hyphen. This excludes many characters from Eastern European alphabets and all non-Latin alphabets such as Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic, as well as other forms of writing such as Chinese. If the current proposal, called Internationalising Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) is adopted by Nominet, then words containing foreign characters could be used to register names under the .co.uk domain. Some other domain registries already used IDNA, including .info and .jp, already support IDNA. IDNA uses combinations of the 37 core symbols to create the new symbols. Every domain name using the new system begins with the characters "xn--"; for instance, the domain name www.café .co.uk would be represented as www.xn--caf-fsa.co.uk. Nominet's rules currently prevent any domain name registration beginning with "xn--". In theory, all Nominet needs to do to allow IDNA is change this rule, but in practice there are serious issues that need to be considered, said the organisation. In its consultation paper, Nominet said that now the user base of the Internet is truly international, "it is widely believed that there is a need for domain names to go beyond these 37 characters… Even other Western European languages make use of characters other than the 37 core symbols... The nature of the UK is such that many citizens speak and write in these non-English languages in their everyday life." Nominet said it would be "naïve to dismiss this as a 'minority' or 'foreign' problem – as there are words in both English and Welsh that require letters beyond the 37 core symbols." Four options are up for discussion, said Nominet. It can do nothing, in which case, it said, it will get left behind and become less attractive to registrants "as we will not be offering what our customers can get elsewhere". The second option is for Nominet to allow IDNA registrations but provide no new infrastructure, which would be very little trouble for Nominet but would mean the domain name lookup service WHOIS would not return a result for café.co.uk even if xn--caf-fsa.co.uk was registered. Option three would see Nominet offer some facilities that would enable WHOIS lookups to work, and option four would see it provide full support at significant cost to its members. The consultation paper is available on Nominet's website. Earlier this year, it was reported that that International Domain Names could be used in phishing attacks. Users of Web browsers such as Opera, Safari and Firefox were said to be vulnerable to cybercriminals who registered domain names similar to those of popular e-commerce and banking sites, but with one or more cyrillic letters rather than Latin. All these browsers were soon patched against the vulnerability. Microsoft's Internet Explorer was unaffected, as it does not yet support IDN. |
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