DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Matt Haughey has written recently about domain hijackings. In subsequent reading I discovered an interesting resource — the DMOZ archive of domain-dispute news stories, sorted by domain. To be clear, not all disputed domains are the result of hijackings; these are generally separate issues.

See also the disputes listing of the World Intellectual Property Organization, whose apparent mission is putting cyber-squatters out of business. The section entitled “Evidence of Registration and Use in Bad Faith” in ICANN’s Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy delineates the conditions in which WIPO, as ICANN’s dispute-resolution division, determines whether a domain has been registered in bad faith.

Domain squatters are one of the lowest life forms that have achieved Internet access. I am happy to see a forum where they regularly lose claim to their assets.

Of course, the system is not perfect… sometimes there is no clear claim, as in the case of brown-shoes.com. In this dispute, the domain owner made a good case for the rights to the domain, a combination of generic words that forms a generic shoe-industry term, but which happens to be similar to a registered trademark (Brown Shoe Company Inc.). WIPO, perhaps too conditioned to side with large corporations (who most frequently are the folks who can afford to dispute domain ownership), forced transfer of the domain to Brown Shoe Company.