Google steps up domain trademark enforcement for its brands.
After many years of using domain arbitration as the last resort for picking up trademark domains, Google has gotten involved in the domain arbitration process in a big way this year. Either it is changing its trademark domain recapturing process or the number of AWOL trademark registrants is on the rise.
When Google filed a case for GoogleAdwords.com last year, my question to Google was ‘what took you so long?’. A Google spokesperson responded:
We seek to recover domain names that are likely to confuse users into thinking that sites are authorized by Google. Our first step is to contact the domain registrant to express our concerns and seek a voluntary transfer of the domain name. In this case we tried to contact the registrant several times to no avail and as a result filed an UDRP arbitration.
If that’s still the policy, then it is having a tough time getting registrants to respond to its correspondence: so far this year the company has filed 24 UDRP actions, compared to 16 last year. Google filed five cases last month alone.
Last month Google filed cases for googlenetbiz.com, chotagoogle.com, googlemapsargentina.com, googlenetcash.com & googlenetcash.net, and googleinstores.com.
Some of the cases Google won this year include googleprofiles.com, youtubeislam.com, googleventures.com, and googlegameroom.com.
According to records at UDRPsearch, Google has filed 82 cases. It has lost only one: a controversial case for Froogles.com. That case resulted in a lawsuit.
Source DomainNameWire.com