[Noisebridge-discuss] Dealing with a cybersquatter

[Sai Emrys]

Looks like they offered to sell for $600 (option 2). I was half
expecting a counter of $250k or some similarly crazy shit.

Hm... worth it?

- Sai

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 7:19 PM, Sai Emrys <sai at saizai.com> wrote:
> 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
>