Domain Name Laws & Internet Trademark

Monte:-“Hello. Welcome back to Domain Masters. We appreciate everybody really getting into the lounge. I appreciate all the feedback. We are going to get to some questions at the end of the show. It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. John Berryhill. John represents a lot of clients who own domain names, I’ve had a relationship with him for several years now. He has written an article in our newsletter and is one of the foremost authorities in domain law and intellectual property law and there is so much going on in domain name law right now and some of the new policies, with ICANN and UDRP and Lypoclaims and we’re hopefully going to dive into some of that stuff right here on the show. So, John welcome to the show.”

Jay:-“Thank you Rush, I’ve been a fan of yours for years.”

Monte:-“How did you know I was a Republican?”

Jay:-“Well I heard you started making some money.”

Monte:-“Yeah and it all goes to my lovely wife.”

Jay:-“I didn’t realize that when you invited me to be on the show I thought I was going to Florida.”

Monte:-“Well you just came from Florida. We had a nice first introduction with each other after corresponding through email and telephone for a couple so many years, we finally got to meet each other in person.”

Jay:-“You are one of the few people who actually looks more handsome than you do in email.”

Monte:-“Thank you. And you are quite a great speaker and I thought it would be great to have you on the show. And I really wanted to get out some of the really, really important things that you want to talk about, about what is currently going on in domain law and some of the areas you think you can provide some really good input for those of us who own domain names and have been involved in people taking our domain names. And people who have been involved with corporations who have said they own domain names that one registered legitimately or not legally. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?”

Jay:-“Well you know it is this entire obsessive topic with a lot of domain owners up to a certain point. There is an ICANN policy, an administrative policy, called the uniform domain dispute resolution policy that is imposed on all domain registration contracts for .com, .net, and .org and some of the country code TLD’s and two letter TLD’s. That is a streamline process that is designed for clear cut case of abusive registrations. People would register famous trademarks and try to extort company’s for money.”

Monte:-“This is back in good old days before trademark law made its way to the internet.”

Jay:-“It was in the early days- big company’s didn’t know what internet was. One of the earliest situations was when a video jockey from MTV heard this internet thing and got permission to register MTV.com and ran off with it. It wasn’t for a few years, parent company decides they want internet presence and found that this person was sitting there that was 1 of the original domain disputes. The thing is there are 40 million domain names registered in .com and over the course of 4 years there have been 75,800 domain disputes. -That really isn’t many

Small sub-fraction of a percent of the difference. Someone said well what are domain names worth- it is like real estate and 1 of the principals is that if you have value and someone wants it they feel frustrated in an effort to get it. They are going to try whatever way they can and I’ve gotten to the point where people will say anything to get a domain name, not to say there are a lot of light trade owners with legitimate cases, the difficulty is some domains are worth tremendous value, domain have sold for millions dollars, the cost of entry to register is a very small amount. That’s what makes it interesting- there are few arenas in life someone with $20 dollars in their pocket can hold the key to the next product, service, or big thing that a large company wants to do. If you have that random chance come along and make the domain very valuable, some are inherently valuable. Among people who develop large portfolios of domain names you get to a point where you no longer have the individuals with $20 dollars in their pocket. These are emotional issues, not a conspiracy of big company’s against little guys. Its not like if you run a supermarket and every now and then someone trips and falls and there’s certain legal risks you have to manage in rational way.”