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Cybersquatting Wikipedia Definition

By Enrico Schaefer

Click link here...According to the U.S. federal law known as the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, Cybersquatting is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price, an act which some deem to be extortion.

The term is derived from "squatting", which is the act of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use. Cybersquatters usually ask for prices far greater than that at which they purchased it. Some cybersquatters put up derogatory remarks about the person or company the domain is meant to represent in an effort to encourage the subject to buy the domain from them.

Cybersquatters sometimes register variants of popular trademarked names, a practice known as typosquatting.

Cybersquatting is one of the most loosely used terms related to domain name intellectual property law and is often incorrectly used to refer to the sale or purchase of generic domain names such as shoes.com; where a covetous party has designs on unseating the entity that was first to register.

Full post as published by AntiCybersquatting Consumer Protection Act Blog on July 21, 2006 (boomark / email).