Protecting Your Domain Name

This is the flip side of the domain name dispute problem. If you are successful with your online operation, sooner or later someone is going to try to use a name similar to yours, either on purpose or by mistake. Now you must decide what action to take, if any.

In general, being nice is the best tactic. If the name overlap is an honest one from a legitimate business run by decent people, the best thing you can do is make sure both your sites carry prominent links to the other's, be friends, and go on about your business. The legal cost of this kind of arrangement is zero if you can do it with an informal contract, and very low even if you decide on a negotiated contract that specifies link and logo size, and its exact placement on each business's site.

Doing nothing at all can also be a good decision in many cases. If your site's content and <metatags> are clear, in most cases there is little chance of customers confusing the two businesses even if their real-life names and domain names are similar, as long as they are located in different places or don't compete directly with each other.

A far more nefarious situation is the porn peddler or other unsavory business person who intentionally gets a domain name a single letter or other easily-made mistake away from a popular site's domain name in order to draw "typo traffic." The most famous example of this is www.whitehouse.com; as of March, 2002, it was still there, still claiming, "We are the Worldwide Leader in Adult and Political Entertainment …"

This site has been around since 1997, getting traffic because many people looking for the United States President's site type ".com" instead of the correct "www.whitehouse.gov" address. If your site draws significant traffic or is attached to a heavily promoted brand name, you may want to spend some time, now and then, typing in domain names similar to yours to see what you find. If they're pornographers, spammers, or others whose business practices don't jive with your standards, you may be able to resolve the problem through ICANN (www.icann.org), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. This body controls domain name assignments. There have been many complaints about how it handles domain name disputes, but it is the only mechanism currently available worldwide.

The other alternative is the court system wherever you are, and if you are dealing with someone in another country whom you believe is misusing your domain name in some way, there are jurisdiction problems even though most countries have signed intellectual property rights treaties that are supposed to help make trademark and copyright laws uniform throughout the world, especially as they apply to Internet matters.