Author name: fairwindsp

By Steve Levy We’ve all heard of patent trolls and perhaps trademark or copyright trolls but I’ve only ever considered the idea of a UDRP troll in the depths of my dark imagination. That is until now. It seems that bold and almost-clever bad actors have realized that it may be possible to steal a

By Steve Levy It’s not uncommon to pull on a thread and end up with an entire ball of yarn. And so it occasionally happens with domain name enforcement. By doing some careful research, one can sometimes find other domain names that are related to each other and may be owned by the same person

By Steve Levy Back in the mid to late 90s, when use of the internet was just gaining popularity, brand owners started becoming aware of domain names that included trademarks which were being registered by people who had no connection with the company and no license or other authorization to use the marks. Sometimes these

By Steve Levy In UDRP cases there are a few “frequent flyers” – habitual cybersquatters who keep coming back again and again. Successful in monetizing their domain names through pay-per-click links, for-sale offers, or by more nefarious means, they’ve made a living out of impersonating major brands and confusing internet users. Atop of this mountain

By Steve Levy After about 30 years of watching cybersquatting flourish, I’d have thought that most typo domain names had been taken or transferred to their assertive brand owners through enforcement actions. Of course, there are more possible permutations available in the .com top-level domain space alone (587 to be exact) than there are stars in

By Jeanette Eriksson   Platforms like Roblox allow millions of users to create, share, and monetize their own virtual experiences. However, this increase in user-generated content can also lead to the need for certain legal considerations, particularly concerning the unauthorized use of a brand’s trademarks and logos. By remaining vigilant in this emerging virtual area,

By Steve Levy Way back near the dawn of the 21st century, before the tsunami that was to become known as “social media” crashed upon the shores of our collective notions of sanity, a photographer touched off what has become one of the earliest and most enduring internet memes that has since reverberated around the

By Steve Levy A couple of recent UDRP decisions have highlighted the issue of what’s within the scope of, and appropriate for the policy and what disputes are really better suited for resolution in a courtroom setting. A frequent comment is that the UDRP was designed only to handle obvious cases of cybersquatting. It was

By Steve Levy Not all domain name disputes need to end up as UDRP complaints. Although it’s become more of a challenge since the adoption of the GDPR – which registrars have used as a reason to hide nearly ALL useful whois contact information – demand letters and other outreach to domain name owners can sometimes lead

By Steve Levy You know that an issue has grown to a substantial size when it makes it into The Wall Street Journal. For many years now, FairWinds has been helping clients navigate the dangers of online counterfeits and fraud and it seems we were well ahead of the curve. A June 10th WSJ article, quoting

By Steve Levy In all the years I’ve been filing UDRP complaints, there had only been a couple of cases where I’ve encountered evidence that was blatantly manufactured in an effort to show that a domain name owner had legitimate rights to the disputed domain name. In one case, a respondent submitted a modified corporate registration

By Steve Levy Do you really know the nuts and bolts of what goes into a successful UDRP case? Let’s start with the basics. There’s the Policy itself, the UDRP Rules, and then each dispute provider has its own Supplemental Rules. In order to win, the party filing the case (the “Complainant”) needs to prove the