[Noisebridge-discuss] Dealing with a cybersquatter

[Sai Emrys]

I'd like to register a domain name for a commercial project I'm working on.

It's a catchy phrase, which has no registered trademarks per USPTO
search, and would be fairly good for my project.

Unfortunately, the domain is held by a cybersquatter. I'd rather not
mention the actual name here, but
a) it is using the exact same template as http://www.gdys168.com/sale.html
b) the registrar is NicReg.com, with WHOIS privacy guard out of Russia
c) the .org and .net variants are held by a small German competitor

I've not made any contact yet.

AFAICT (please correct any mistakes), my options are:
1. come up with a different name that might be worse for my business
2. pay the squatter >$500 (I have no idea how much they'd actually sell for)
3. register it as a trademark (cost ~$280-2000) and then
a) contact them and ask them nicely to sell it for cost (see
http://www.gdys168.com/tm.html), or
b) contest it w/ ICANN UDRP (cost ~$1000-2000?)

I might want to register the trademark at some point in the future
anyway, but at the moment, I just want to get the domain as cheaply as
possible.

What should I do?

Have any of you dealt with this situation before? If yes, how'd you
resolve it and how much did it cost?

If you prefer, feel free to reply offlist or by IM / IRL.

Thanks,
Sai