Posts tagged Price Tags

Every day we hear of strange UDRP decisions that really make the whole domain investment game more difficult. In the recent LegalSupply.com UDRP decision, the panelist says “The Transfer Of A Domain Is Equivalent To A New Registration”.

So tomorrow if some company goes and trademarks a term similar to a generic domain you own, even renewing it past that tm date could be taken as a ‘new registration’. I wonder how these panelists even justify their thought process given the fact that domains cannot be registered for more than 10 years.

Companies that couldn’t afford the generic to start with now are using the UDRP as a sort of crap shoot, “let’s take a chance, after all $1500 is a lot less than what we’d have to pay to buy the domain legally”. And in a lot of cases the filing is done years after the domain was registered.

This makes the high value domain space a rich man’s game, one where lawyers on retainer are the norm and not an aberration. People with excellent generic portfolios might even consider legal liability insurance the way things are going now. And buying a high value item without trademark protection might soon become a thing of the past, adding more money for the legal community and less for the investor.

Would this, in the long run, affect domain resale prices, specially those with large price tags? And is it no longer safe to park or even list your domain for sale to avoid such predatory encroachment by corporate entities who didn’t have the foresight to get the domains and are now using legal muscle to take over valuable virtual real estate from those that did. Please share your views in the comments section.