Letters after the “dot” are commonly used as labels
for top-level domains, or TLDs. Three types of TLDs
currently exist.
Sponsored domains: These admit to their ranks only members from their communities. For instance, only museums, educational institutions and adult entertainment outfits qualify for dot-museum, dot-edu, and the recently-minted dot-xxx domains, respectively. 1
Country domains:
Getting this TLD
often means
proving some
connection to a
country, such as
having a business
incorporated, a
trademark
registered
or individual
residing in
the country.
2
Generic domains: The most
well-known TLDs belong
to this category. Common
generic domains include
dot-com, dot-net, dot-org,
and dot-biz. Look out for
new generic domains, such
as the controversial dot-xxx.
to use it in the market, a competitor might try to sneak in a
trademark application to block you. If you do the inverse, they
might try to register domain names.”
Aside from reserving actual domain names, companies may
want to register confusingly similar monikers as well.
In addition to registering brands under familiar top-level
domains (TLDs), such as dot-com and dot-ca, a company
might also consider dot-org, dot-net and dot-biz. Similarly, if the brand name consists of two or more words, reserve it by running the words together ( YourBrand.com)
as well as hyphenated ( Your-Brand.com).
Another handy tip: Reserve common misspellings of
the brand name to keep typosquatters at bay and prevent traffic from going to sites a company has no control over.
Domain name misspellings and other possible misuses are so great in number that to cover them all may
be cost-prohibitive.
“There are a hundred permutations and combinations
just on ingdirect.ca alone, and they can’t protect all of
them,” says James Kosa, an associate at Toronto-based
Kosa once got a surprise when he visited his bank’s
website. “I think I missed the ‘I’ in ‘direct’ and I ended
up on a typosquatting site.”
The typosquatters who own ingdrect.ca don’t try to mimic
the bank’s site. Instead, they engage in passive domain name
monetization, using software to automatically generate links to
other websites.
The business model is similar to that of spam: many typo
sites, featuring inexpensive domain names, drive traffic to
linked sites, which leads to sales. “If traffic is high enough,
even one sale in 10,000 clicks makes the site owner a profit,”
Kosa says.
Once companies take steps to protect their marks, they
can monitor the web for infringements or outsource this
responsibility. “Third-party trademark monitoring
services are starting to incorporate domain names in
their searching and monitoring,” says Toronto-based
Norton Rose associate Adam Haller.
Be wary of domain
name scams
“Certain entities in China track trademark applications
made in Canada,” Glover says. “They then reserve nine or 10
different Asian domain names and e-mail the trademark applicant telling them an entity has reserved their domain names.”
Such registrations might not matter to companies with no
expansion plans for the Pacific Rim. However, “to create the
perception that the domain name has value, they approach
you saying somebody else is interested,” Kosa says.
Peter Cooke offers the explanation he’s been given by counsel in Asia: “Registrars in Asia have been given quotas that
they have to meet, so overzealous registrars use this tactic to
increase the number of domain names they register.” The Ot-
