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Domainers get bad press. If you do a general search, you can read about the countless complaints that companies have filed against domainers for trademark violations.  This is a serious problem within the industry and there are many malicious people out there who don’t think twice about infringing upon a company’s trademark.

When I first began domaining, I was very naive to this problem.  Even worse, I didn’t have an appreciation for how many terms that I thought were generic were actually trademarked.  The first and only time I had a complaint sent to me about a violation was when I registered a domain name that contained the term “realtor”.  I honestly thought the term was just a generic word used by real estate professionals. After owning the domain for approximately a month I was contacted by a representative from the National Association of Realtors.  I was told that I couldn’t legally develop the website.   In response, I quickly turned the domain back over to the registrar.  Why?  Because I had obviously purchased something that I wasn’t entitled to.

After that incident, I learned that research is important.  I also began to realize the extent of this trademark infringement problem in the domaining world.  If you do a simple search of the domains for sale at eBay, for example, you’ll probably find that 10-20% of the names sold on any given day are clearly infringing upon trademarks of companies.  I think many domainers register these names for quick resells to unsuspecting end users.  I assume people buy these names because they think they can ride the coattails of the larger company so to speak.  They are looking for easy traffic for their developed website.  The problem for these end users is they can never win.  Many cybersquatters have had to pay thousands of dollars in fines for infringing upon a person or company’s trademark.  It simply isn’t worth it.  Here is a list of the latest infringement cases:

http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/casesx/list.jsp?prefix=D&year=2009&seq_min=1&seq_max=199

Real domaining is about speculation.  It is a speculative game, just like real estate and stock investing.  I buy names at a certain price, I market them as best I can, and then I hope to sell them for a profit.  What is hurting the image of domaining are participants in the marketplace that are completely devoid of any business ethics.  Ethics is important to help maintain a set of acceptable business practices.  By purposely registering domains that contain trademarks, these cybersquatters have brought down a lot of heat on the domaining business.  I honestly don’t know what the solution to this problem is.  However, we can all start to help by defending the industry.  Domainers are not cybersquatters.  Domainers don’t knowingly purchase trademarked domain names.  If we all make a better effort to be more professional in our business dealings, we may improve the image of domaining.  All it usually takes is a simple google search to find if a term is trademarked.