Trademark Owners Beware – Cybersquatting Spreads to Twitter
TechCrunch reports that its brand has been taken as a Twitter name, and that there is a landrush going on to get these names, which are already trading for money. The problem is so bad that a name brokerage, Tweexchange, has sprung up to get to facilitate sales. Twitter has posted a policy outlawing the sale of names, but a quick review of this policy reveals that it’s as as toothless as a newborn baby, and is clearly more observed in the breach than otherwise.
Trademark owners might want to take note of a worrying trend — valuable names that fall outside the DNS, outside any of the recommendations made by ICANN’s IRT (Implementation Recommendation Team), outside the UDRP (Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy), and outside of any recourse except for the creaky, expensive, and slow-moving protections of national trademark laws. Twitter’s policy offers none of the protections of ICANN’s current system, let alone the expanded protections foreseen by the IRT recommendations.
Twitter should be looking hard at a new .TWITTER top-level domain, so that it doesn’t have to come up with its own dispute policy. Whatever that policy ends up being, it is sure to engender numerous lawsuits and the headaches and expense that come with them.
Trademark owners, for their part, would be far better off encouraging Twitter to apply for the top-level domain .TWITTER, so that naming disputes could handled by the umbrella policies that are already built into ICANN, instead of the reactive, seat-of-the-pants policies that will emerge from private companies.
By opposing new top-level domains, and thereby encouraging the palpable demand for new names to leak out of the DNS system and into private namespaces, trademark owners are inviting a world of woe upon themselves. Instead of one uniform policy, they are about to find themselves reacting to multiple policies in multiple namespaces governed by recalcitrant companies whose commercial imperatives are completely opposed to what trademark holders see as their legal responsibilities.
Next up — Facebook. After that, who knows? There will be more.
Facebook will act very quickly if they receive a report of an infringement. We were able to get “blacknight” within 24 hours of me reporting that someone else had taken it.
Twitter, on the other hand, are incredibly slow to respond to any support queries, so I sincerely doubt that they’d handle “squatting” in a timely manner
Hold on… Stop…
Do not ever ask the government to help you. We’re the government, and we are here to help you, is one of the biggest lies ever said or propagated.
No, the answer to the early adoption of trademarked names is not to demand government intervention- for it implies the market does not already afford itself protection from this behavior.
But, you protest, the market does not have protection from this behavior- i Submit, that the government INTERFERES with the market’s own solutions to this problem, and hamstrung by the government, the problem persists throughout new technologies.
Also, Intellectual Property is to protect resources that exist in scarcity. Ideas are not scarce resources. If they were, there would be no schools, or libraries, public or private, for fear of spreading ideas for free to people who did not pay for them.
No, the answer is not to ask for, or demand government involvement. If you do, you will get it, GOOD AND HARD.
The efficiency of the post office, the pleasantness of the BMV, and the wrecklessness of the Federal Reserve and the government, and you want their help? No thanks.
I think the follow up story should be interviews with people and organizations who have done the work of designing private solutions to these issues. Are you willing to do that reporting? If you cop out and suggest there are none, it is because you have not looked.
No, the answer is not to ask for, or demand government involvement. If you do, you will get it, GOOD AND HARD.