Twilight Domain Name Cybersquatting

It could be argued that twilight.com’s owner Tom Markson simply likes the movies, books, and whole Twilight franchise and has no intention of cybersquatting.  But Summit Entertainment, the very lucrative Twilight Franchise’s owner isn’t buying that argument.  Mr. Markson is in no way related to Summit Entertainment, and has owned the twilight.com web site since 1994, far before the rise of the Stephanie Meyer books, and their Hollywood versions.  Twilight.com is being sued by Summit Entertainment for copyright and trademark infringement.   But Markson’s argument seems a little flimsy considering there are Adsense ads on the page, and he’s probably made at least some amount of revenue from such a high profile page and it’s Adsense links.  Making matters worse, the site looks very unprofessional and could give fans the impression that Summit Entertainment is either shabby and clueless, or at least very strange about their marketing efforts.  Markson responded to a cease and desist letter from Summit in 2009 by denying their claims.

Sprinkles Cupcakes Wages Trademark Lawsuit

Sprinkles Cupcakes gained huge popularity due to its delicious cupcakes and also to a helping hand from the PR gained from getting on the Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart show. The company which has locations in Beverly Hills, Chicago, New York and throughout the country, is taking aim at a newer store which opened in 2009, called Pink Sprinkles . Sprinkles Cupcake, owned by Candace Nelson, a celebrity judg

e on the reality television show Cupcake Wars, has filed a lawsuit for trademark infringement and under the Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (regarding the domain name it uses) in the U.S. District Court of Connecticut, all in connection with its federal registration for SPRINKLES CUPCAKE U.S. Reg. No. 3,250,609.

The case is a fairly straight forward trademark infringement claim. Will Pink Sprinkles claim that their addition of the word "Pink" is different enough to avoid infringement, or possibly do they have some other defense? Stay tuned.

Cybersquatting of New Domain Names

Here’s some interesting news: The likelihood of cybersquatting remains high for .com's but is much less ICANN’s new domains. According to a recent study by a top-level domain (TLD) consulting firm called Minds+Machines, internet domains other than .com (such as .net, .biz and .info) aren’t currently pursued by cybersquatters. Furthermore, the study suggests that the new assortment of generic top-level domains (gTLD’s), recently created by ICANN will not attract cybersquatters either. These domains include .mobi, .cat, .name, .asia, .pro, .tel and .travel.

The study was conducted thusly: Minds+Machines examined domain name registration of more than 1,000 Fortune 100 brands. They reason that if a trademark name is available at a domain, neither the company nor cybersquatters are concerned with the open real estate. The danger of trademark infringement is assumed to be low, given the apparent lack of interest in the site. According to the study, 100 percent of the companies were registered in .com sites. The already-established gTLD’s outside of .com (.org, .net, .biz and .info) had between 65 and 87 percent name registration. The new categories mentioned above had less than 30 percent registration.

These numbers do show that cybersquatting is an issue in the .com category. However, they fail to prove anything about the future of internet domain value. Will these new domains continue to be ignored in the long term? It’s hard to say. Current internet patterns may not be indicative of the future. Fifteen years ago, could anyone have predicted the current power of social media?