A URS wwas filed by designer fashion house Christian Dior on the domain name Dior.clothing yesterday.
I’m going to blame the company for this one.
No one likes to pay for insurance just like no one wants to spend money to register defensive domains, but if your in business you need to do certain things and make good business decisions.
So while I don’t expect any brand (although some did) to go and register or block hundreds of new gTLD’s in every possible extension, domains that are bang on to their core business have to be protected.While some people are quick to call defensive domain registrations “extortion”, I see it no differently than a lot of expenses businesses incur to protect themselves and their assets. A high end brick and mortar store like Dior will have to have liability insurance, theft insurance and 10 other type of insurances, hiring guards, spend six figures for camera’s and alarms systems none of which bring the company any more business, but if a Dior store didn’t have guards or an alarm system or cameras and got ripped off most people have little sympathy for the operator of the store.
Dior.clothing is one of those domains that the company had to register.
They could have gotten it in sunrise or in an EAP 5 for a couple of hundred dollars.
Now they spent far more to just get a domain name suspended.
I didn’t love having to spend money to register mostwanted.domains but of course I had to, otherwise someone would have grabbed it and it would have cost me more to fight over it then to just get it suspended and then have to spend the same money next year to get it registered when it drops.
On the other hand STATOIL ASA URS filing for the domain names statoil.holdings and statoil.ventures are on the outer fringe and a URS seems like a perfectly good move by the company to get those suspended.
A few Interesting UDRP’s filed in the last couple of days is one on iFunny.com which shows a creation date of 2001 and on the domain name justbelieve.com which has an original creation date of 1999.
Finally another fashion designer filed a UDRP over a domain that seems to becoming the new “sucks” FuckCalvinKlein.com which was just registered in February of this year.
Of course Godaddy offered some very helpful alternatives to the .com in case you want a similar domain for yourself:
Let’s face it these dummies are going to keep registering these names they shouldn’t be, the World is much to large, and filled with to many people with big dreams, and lack of ambiltion. Also these companies are going to continue dropping the ball when it comes to blocking these names out.
I can understand from the companies prespective, this is an endless cycle of extortion type blocking, first with .xxx, then .sucks, when is the madness going to end. This will continue to happen, as there was not enough homework done to find a better system, or educate end users on how to go about avoiding all this. As we continue on various other groups continue to have ownership over such brands as cloud, luxury etc.. and game the system, Donuts lack of enthuiasm for setting an example, and taking these names back from these parties, shows how clueless they really are to this entire process.
Should we expect, even a well known company to register every gtld out there? Hell, I didn’t even know “.clothing” existed until I read your article…………….
I’m sorry, gTLD is NOT an insurance. It was created for the sole purpose for ICANN and Registrars to extort money from existing brands and organizations and .com owners. it is no different than “CDO’s” that were created for sub-prime mortgages to hide the real cost and risk from buyers and sellers.
Alan
Big brands have lawyers and brand protection have brand protectionmregistrars so yes they should and do know these new gTLD’s are coming.
All the brand protection guys keep their client very well informed when Sunrise opens and closes for each string, when they go live and all other developments along the way,
the same way they know enough to file a legal action against the registrants of the domain shortly after registration.
We are not talking about Sally’s Dress Shop down the street we are talking about a fashion brand that did $25 BILLION in Revenue in and has almost 85,000 employees (2 year old numbers, sure much higher now)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Dior_S.A.
Given what their revenues are into the billions, it does not seem right that they are being put into a situation where they must pay Donuts, and ICANN, and countless others protection money for their brands. Are these parties not profiting from the goodwill of these companies?
@MB……….I see your point but imo Dior is doing the right thing by filing a URS and a UDRP if necessary. I would rather spend thousands of dollars to protect my brand before I handed over a penny of it to a cyber squatting extortionist…person or registrar. Dior is a well known trademark and I would
go after and sue the people who registered it.
Alan
They are doing the right thing now but the best thing would have been to register the domain and use it in an ad campaign or forward it to their site.
They didn’t have to spend a thousand dollars to protect their brand they could have spent a couple of hundred and not have to deal with lawyers.
And they don’t get the domain if they win.
They didn’t file a lawsuit so they can’t get damages or money.
maybe they don’t want to support the new gtld program, feeling bullied and pushed into registering umpteen extensions. i don’t think you can compare it to yourself, as from the amount of times i’ve seen your name in whois on new gtld domains, you are very much into them.