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The take-the-money-and-run image of the dotcom world is illustrated

no more starkly than by those who bag a domain name just to sell it on and

make a fast buck. Opportunists, parasites, cybersquatters; call them what

you will, they’re out there.

Marks & Spencer, for example, won a landmark case in the courts last year

against some bright spark who registered the M&S name before the retailer

could get there. But it’s not just individuals that stand accused.

As reported in Revolution last week (10 May, p6), a small holding company,

Glenburn Ventures, found the name of its proposed e-commerce venture,

sheerheaven.com, swallowed up days after sheerheaven.co.uk had been

registered.

”Strange how, after going online and establishing the availability of a

dotcom domain, it is taken by an email hosting company,” says Glenburn’s

managing director, John Boulton.

The name in question here was taken up by web and email hosting company

another.com, formerly funmail. Another.com leases novelty-type names,

which it calls ”informal and personal” email addresses.

It has registered more than 10,000 of these - a figure it says is growing

by around 200 every week. ”We keep track of phrases and words in popular

culture with the help of a full-time editor and producer,” says managing

director Graham Goodkind.

Whether or not ”keeping track” can be stretched to mean snapping up the

dotcom version of any address that has recently been registered with a

.co.uk suffix is a different matter. Another.com doesn’t sell the names it

registers. Instead, it buys them with a view to leasing them out and

hosting them as email addresses. The same is true for Streetnames.com,

which floated on AIM last Friday. It has registered 6,500 names, such as

highburycorner.com and downingstreetw1.com.

Glenburn’s Boulton acknowledges that another.com has done nothing illegal

in registering his desired name, but says: ”I would say to anyone else out

there, for Christ’s sake, bite the bullet and buy the name in all its

variants and suffixes.”

It is often difficult for smaller players and start-ups to mount a case

that proves a name has been registered by another party in bad faith

simply in order to sell it on at a sizeable profit.

Law firm Eversheds has just launched dotcomresolution

(www.dotcomresolution.com), an online service for parties involved in

domain name disputes. ”We intend to limit the exposure and costs to

people,” says the firm’s head of contentious intellectual property, Antony

Gold. ”Elements of the service are offered on a fixed-price basis.

Otherwise, we’ll give clients an idea of the sorts of costs they could

suffer if they get involved in disputes.” He adds: ”A great number of

disputes tend to be settled with a solicitor’s letter, because the merits

of one party’s case are often clear-cut.”

A recent example he cites is that of a disgruntled former employee of a

leisure company, who registered domain names that corresponded to the

trading names of one of the company’s subsidiaries.

Domain name registries also adopt codes that all parties registering a

name must abide by. For example, the world’s largest registrar, Network

Solutions, adopts the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and

Numbers) code, which is legally binding. However, the remit of Network

Solutions and ICANN is limited to the suffixes .com, .net and .org.

Nominet, which controls UK-related domain names, subscribes to a

professional code, but it isn’t binding.

Steve Miller, head of marketing at domain name registration company

Virtual Internet, says: ”We have to be seen as the white knights, ensuring

the integrity of parties registering names.” The company operates Net

Searches, a service to help organisations win back their trading names

from other companies.

”We’ve signed up some big clients, so it’s not just start-ups falling foul

of this. A lot of start-ups try and come up with a name in the cafe or

down the pub. It’s crucial that they register whatever they decide upon in

as many variants as they can afford as early as possible.”