Protecting one’s brand is pretty much standard practice for large online properties like Facebook. As a result, the social network giant now owns hundreds of domain names, of which only a few are actually used. The rest have been taken over from others for “safekeeping.”

We find it rather amusing that Facebook itself now owns domain names such as:

Read more

What do you expect from the biggest, most tech savvy information technology corporations when you enter the world’s fastest growing web member community with 55 million visits every month?

We looked the Twitter presence of some of the world’s 100 biggest IT companies in April, 2009, and we were surprised with the results. While some actors seemed to communicate effectively, a majority of the companies seemed not to control their brands, and ten percent of the company names were unregistered.

Read more

Every year, companies find that someone has registered domain names involving their trademarks, or variations of their domain names that are confusingly similar to the original. If a solution can’t be found by talking to the registrant of the offending domain name(s), a formal dispute usually follows.

WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization (an agency of the UN), has an arbitration and mediation center for domain disputes, and they continually publish the results of these disputes, as well as related facts and figures.

We have summarized some of the most interesting data in this article, and we have also tried to figure out the underlying reason for the increase in domain disputes. Well, at least we have a pretty good theory involving Google AdSense…

Read more