Domain grabbing
The term domain grabbing (also: domain warehousing) denotes the (sometimes abusive) registration of a large number of Internet domain names.
Unlike the Cybersquatting ( Cyber Occupy ), which primarily known company, brands - offered registered as domain names or product names and the respective rights holder to purchase, referring domain grabbing largely on the registration of generic terms. For example, words of daily use are registered in all conceivable forms and top-level domains (e.g. salary.example, more-salary.example, top-salary.example).
Overview
The aim is either to sell these domains at a profit or, through active use, to suggest to visitors that you are a website on a certain topic or term, although the content has little to do with the term used as a domain name. So often pseudo search engines are only operated to market the inserted advertising links, without offering the advantages of real search engines. Often one also uses automatically generated content or a collection of pure advertising links, so-called domain parking .
This method is particularly popular with dialer providers who take advantage of the familiarity of a domain and register a similarly written domain for themselves, the so-called typosquatting .
A distinction between domain grabbing in the sense of hamsters for a wide variety of purposes and domain grabbing as part of domain trading (registration of domains in reserve for sale) is hardly possible - both include the registration of domains in greater numbers than for immediate personal use. Although this hamster is classified as a legal aspect of domain trading in many cases in domain name law, spectacular cases of abuse are also known again and again.
According to current case law, the massive registration of generic terms , which by their nature cannot be registered as trademarks , is not anti-competitive and is therefore not relevant under civil or criminal law.
Controversial cases and consequences
EURid , the register of the top-level domain eu , took legal action in 2007 against a registrant of 10,000 .eu domains, who accused her of not being an EU citizen and therefore not entitled to claim. This was the second known case of improper domain grabbing in the eu top-level domain. The year before, the EURid had already taken action against a group of companies based in Cyprus, which it had alleged at the beginning of the landrush phase of the eu domain with the help of 400 phantom registrars and thus 74,000 domains not for real existing customers, but only to have registered for the purpose of a later auction.
Regardless of systematic cases of abuse, domain grabbing and cybersquatting generally contribute to the fact that the proportion of actively used addresses under a top-level domain can shift in favor of addresses reserved for speculative purposes only. As in the case of .eu, this can cause considerable damage to the development of the top-level domain itself. According to studies by the CIO of Ireland's largest search engine and web directory WhoisIreland.com, John McCormac, the proportion of actively used .eu addresses in June 2007 was only 16% compared to 57% for the Irish top-level domain ie . In its 2006 annual report, EURid found 88 cases of professional domain grabbing alone with over 1,000 registered addresses per registrant. In 6 of these cases the number of registrations was even over 10,000. The total share of addresses that were assigned to registrants with 5 or fewer .eu domain names at the end of 2006 was just 46%.
See also
Web links
- Domain grabbing - more information
- Internetrecht-Rostock - Domain grabbing
- The purchase and sale of descriptive domains is not objectionable to the Cologne Regional Court with its decision on welle.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Domainesinfo web service EURid blocks 10,000 .EU names
- ↑ Magazine Wired EU Domain Dream in Disarray
- ↑ Newsletter 374 domain -recht .eu (dotEU) - is the European domain dead?
- ↑ EURid annual report The EU-Domain 2006 ( Memento of the original from November 10, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 1.3 MB)
