Tag: cybersquatting

New document available on the Nameshield’s website: “5 minutes to understand – Abusive domain names registrations

5 minutes to understand - Domain names - Nameshield

The digital world is in perpetual evolution and every days, new domain names are registered around the world.

Among these new registrations, some can potentially affect your notoriety, your activity, and your results. Fraudsters, through these abusive domain names registrations, seek to benefit from your notoriety as quickly as possible.

Find in this “5 minutes to understand” document, available for download on the Nameshield’s website, the different practices of abusive domain names registrations that can affect your brand and the actions to take depending on the infringement caused to the brand.

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Municipal elections 2020: buzyn2020.fr and buzyn2020.paris domain names redirect towards Anne Hidalgo’s campaign

Municipal elections 2020: buzyn2020.fr and buzyn2020.paris domain names redirect towards Anne Hidalgo’s campaign
Image source: Sadnos via Pixabay

Following the announcement on Sunday February 16, of Agnès Buzyn’s candidacy to Paris municipal elections, several political journalists discovered on Monday that the domain name buzyn2020.fr was registered but redirected towards “Paris en commun”, the campaign website of another candidate, Anne Hidalgo.

Several other names were registered on Sunday night, also redirecting towards Paris en commun’s homepage like buzyn2020.paris, agnesbuzyn2020.fr and agnesbuzyn2020.com.

If several of these names were anonymously registered, two of them were registered by the association “Montreuil en Commun”, a group of “four municipal councilors” who claims to be “without any political label” and explains to Numerama the fact that these names were available “indicates the improvisation of her candidacy and LREM’s lightness regarding a serious matter such as a candidacy to run for Paris’ mayor”.

Raising awareness to cybersquatting risks

The LREM candidate will not be able to use the domain name buzyn2020.com either, which was registered on Monday by Crisalyde, a risk and crisis management consulting company.

“I took the opportunity to raise awareness. It’s my job, I saw a risk and I took advantage of it”, explains Selim Miled, Crisalyde’s CEO, to the Parisien.

Cybersquatting is a practice that consists in taking a domain name by registering it, using or mentioning a trademark, a business name, a patronym or any name on which the applicant has any right, in order to make material or moral profit from its current or future notoriety.

Thus, Crisalyde registered 6 domain names: buzyn.paris, agnesbuzyn2020.paris, buzynpourparis.com, buzynpourparis.fr, buzyn2020.info and buzyn2020.com. “As soon as Agnès Buzyn’s team contacts me, I will give them the domain name at the purchased price, with a friendly advice” adds Selim Miled.

What strategy to adopt against cybersquatting?

Agnès Buzyn’s team will have to contact the persons who registered these names, who may decide to graciously give them back or resell them at prices they will have set.

However, legal actions exist aiming to retrieve a cybersquatted domain name, like the UDRP procedure (Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy). This procedure will allow to suppress or transfer the domain name.

And lastly, in order to prevent any cybersquatting risk, it is recommended to implement a domain names registration monitoring to be immediately alerted of any new domain names registration that can potentially infringe your notoriety or your business.

For more information on our online brand protection expertise and domain names recovery procedures, don’t hesitate to contact a Nameshield consultant.

Mastodon : What about cybersquatting ?

Mastodon : What about cybersquatting

 

Communication on social media is the subject of many justified concerns from trademarks owners. As a matter of fact, user’s names creation, called “username”, are not legally protected beforehand. Specifically, the owner has to register or retrieve the username corresponding to their brand or demonstrate to the social media that the use of their brand is used with ill intent. In short, it’s a time consuming activity…

Mastodon, a few months old social network, trendy since a few days, is the subject of some articles regarding its nature, process and goal. But what about the associated brands protection?

Mastodon is a social network, created by Eugen Rochko, a 24 years old German developer. Twitter’s clone where characters are limited to 500, Mastodon is free, open source and not centralized. We will be interested in this last term. It’s possible to access Mastodon with its “basic official” website mastodon.social.

However mastodon.social is only an instance, you can use others like mastodon.fun developed in Angers. You choose a username for an instance and your complete username will be @username@instance. Keep in mind that instances are associable with each other, giving them a federal term.

Anyone can create an instance, so you have two cumulative possibilities:

  • Either you register your brand for all existing instances (today there are more than 2000 of them and it’s only the beginning).
  • Or you create your instance, closed, corresponding to your brand.

As you might have guessed, I will advise you the second choice: as it doesn’t exist any certification on Mastodon, anyone can be anybody. But by creating an instance corresponding to your principal domain name, you create this certification!

Of course .BRAND owners should create social.BRAND so they have a dedicated instance which allows them to highlight their TLD, like @pierre.dupont@social.brand.

If you need more information on Mastodon, don’t hesitate to contact us.