Companies Should Conduct Regular Audits of their Domain Names
It is a golden rule that all businesses should conduct regular audits of the domain names they have - and those they should have.
In other words, companies should regularly:
- ensure they have all important domain names registered; and
- ensure no-one is making improper use of the company’s business or product names through registering unauthorised domain names.
There are now literally thousands of cases where names have simply been taken, improperly registered as domain names and then used to divert internet traffic to competitors or held hostage until the victim pays up and buys the name back.
And, of course, these cases are in addition to those where the name is used to make money by linking it to a pornography site or a shopping mall selling every imaginable range of goods and services- and some that are unimaginable! That, of course, is a very bad look for your company name to be used in that way.
Just how companies can get into trouble - and get out of it - is shown by two recent cases concerning the ANZ Bank.
THE FIRST ANZ BANK CASE
Both cases were decided by arbitrators at WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organisation) in domain name cases where cybersquatters had tried to capture the name of the ANZ Bank in the domain names <anzcard.com> and <anzcards.com>. (Note: Domain names are now expressed in this way. Note also that www.anzcard.com is not a domain name, but the address of a website; the domain name is simply <anzcard.com>.)
In the first ANZ Bank case, a cybersquatter in Vietnam registered <anzcard.com>, an obvious one to register, as it is well known that all banks issue credit cards.
This was a clear attempt to mislead the public into thinking the domain name would lead to an official ANZ Card website.
In fact, it did not lead there. It had not yet been linked to anything, so the ANZ Bank was able to save the domain name by the skin of its teeth.
The arbitrator who decided the case, on 17 August 2007, found that the domain name <anzcard.com> was likely to confuse people with the real ANZ name, that the person who registered it had no legitimate interest in the name and that he had registered and used it in bad faith, because he was obviously going to put it to improper use and probably link it to rival credit card sites.
So the ANZ Bank won and the domain name was transferred to it.
But it could have been worse and in the next case, the cybersquatter had actually gone one step further.
THE SECOND ANZ BANK CASE
In the second ANZ Bank case, decided at WIPO on 25 September 2007, someone in Mumbai in India had registered the domain name in the plural form of <anzcards.com>.
The arbitrator found in this case that the ANZ name and trademark must have been adopted to create the impression of an association with the ANZ Bank, its products and services.
Secondly, there was bad faith because the domain name had already been linked to financial services websites of a whole series of doubtful providers, giving rise to confusion with the ANZ and trading on that confusion to divert consumers away from the bank and into the arms of those rival sites.
So here again, the ANZ Bank succeeded and had the domain name transferred to it.
So the lessons are: try to prevent this sort of problem from arising by making sure you have as many of your company names and services covered by domain names as possible - the registration fees will turn out to be a good investment.
But if your name has been improperly used as a domain name, take legal advice quickly on how you can get it back where it belongs – with its rightful owner.
