Story by
Robin Wauters
Robin Wauters is the European Editor of The Next Web. He describes himself as a hopeless cyberflâneur, a lover of startups, his family a Robin Wauters is the European Editor of The Next Web. He describes himself as a hopeless cyberflâneur, a lover of startups, his family and Belgian beer. If you'd like to know more about Robin, head on over to robinwauters.com or follow him on Twitter.
Google has obtained no less than 763 domain names containing the word ‘google’ after recently filing a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum.
In what Google calls ‘one of the most aggressive campaigns of domain name infringement’ that it has ever come across, someone had registered domains like googleiphone5.com, googlevodafone.com, googlegayfacebook.com, googleclooney.com, googlespiderman.com and googlenewshoes.com.
Google claims this person also forwarded the hundreds of domains to a site under the .xxx top level domain, and that this suggests that he or she was planning to host adult and/or pornographic content.
Amusingly, the respondent filed petitions to cancel two of Google’s US trademark registrations for the ‘GOOGLE’ mark, and tried to defend the domain name registrations by asserting that ‘google’ has become a generic term anyways.
The National Arbitration Forum of course ordered the domain names to be transferred to Google immediately.
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