IAN HARVEY
Toronto Sun
Wednesday, September 1, 1999

It's the Great Internet Name Game.

Or, perhaps, should we call it the Great Internet Name Grab?

With cyberspace becoming such a hot property, everyone and his dog is scrambling to stake out a claim, just like those miners in the Great California Gold Rush of 1849.

This, of course, has led to the phenomenon of cybersquatting, in which speculators register a whack of domain names that they have no intention of using themselves.

Their plan is to sit back and wait for those who do have a business plan and a need for the name to come to them and offer big bucks.

But just registering bigblue.com and waiting for IBM's call may not be the path to riches you anticipated.

In fact, it may lead to a call, or at least a letter, from the wrong people at Big Blue, namely their legal department.

That's because instead of coughing up, big corporations are putting their highly-paid corporate lawyers to work to fight back and take back their names.

Taken seriously

Even the slightest infringement on a corporate brand is being taken with deadly seriousness, as a young, disgruntled customer of the Toronto Dominion Bank discovered when he registered a domain which incorporated the bank's name along the lines of TDsucks.

"I hadn't even put up the site and I got a letter from the bank threatening to sue me," he said. While the law was unclear and his right to free speech might have prevailed in a Charter argument, he also realized he didn't have the cold cash to fight the bank and ditched plans for the domain. "I just wanted to let off a little steam at the way they treated me as a customer.

In the U.S., a bill is making its way through Congress after getting Senate approval. It seeks to give companies greater rights to fight back against interlopers who appropriate names or close facsimiles. There's no similar law planned so far in Canada.

Still, a recent U.S. appeals court ruling struck down an earlier court decision that had stripped a Vancouver company of two domain sites on the the grounds that it diluted the trademark of Avery Dennison Corp., the office products giant.

Mailbank.com, whose business centres on registering family names and then reselling them to common folk with those names for $20 a year, had registered avery.com and dennision.com, hoping an Avery or Dennison would want to rent them.

Mailbank.com has 14,000 domains registered and it cost them $300,000 to prove their case, which now sets an important precedent in Internet law.

But it still won't kill cybersquatting.

"They do it for three reasons," said Chris Young, president and COO of Cyveillance of Arlington, Va. His company gathers information from the Internet for clients about how their name is being used or bandied about. "One, they do it for pure speculative, opportunistic greed. They want money for the domain which they registered.

"Two, they do it because they want to use the brand or name to draw traffic to their site, where they want to sell advertising. And three, they do it for attention or because they have something to say."

Young says Cyveillance doesn't take a stand on the free speech issue, and their sole purpose is to inform clients like Levis Strauss and Bell Atlantic of any Internet intrusions, infringements or infractions.

It's up to the client to take action, he says, but the key issues revolve around creating a more stable, orderly marketplace instead of the "wild, wild west" that the Net currently represents.

Cease-and-desist letters

"It (cybersquatting, name appropriation, unauthorized links) all adds noise to the marketplace," he says. Even something as innocuous as a link to a corporate page can and has been viewed as copyright infringement and has launched cease-and-desist letters.

Still, not all companies send their lawyers after those who launch sites critiquing their business practices or products.

Last year, one American online marketer flew the originator of such a site to their California head office to delve deeper into what triggered his anger. They figured they could learn something from him that would help them better service their customers.

Here in Canada, though, The Toronto Star isn't sitting back at what it sees as an attack on its domain.

The Star, which has a Web site at toronto.com, has launched a $500,000 lawsuit against Garth Cole and Ritchie Sinclair, who launched toronto2.com.

The Star says it's an infringement. Ritchie says it was just a "community" site where "lots of Web masters volunteered time to help create it. We wanted it to be a portal with free e-mail and stuff.

"I mean does, Southam own Canada because they have canada.com?" he argues.

"How can you own the name Toronto? They even went after us because we put a link to someone's site that was also on their claiming they own the copyright. They want to own and control everything. They can sue me, but I don't have any money and we're going to fight this anyway.".