Via the Guardian:
News Corporation-owned MySpace has won the right to use the MySpace.co.uk domain name, although another company had registered the domain back in 1997, six years before the launch of the MySpace network.
“This dispute resolution service decision is counter-intuitive at first sight and serves as a warning that domain registrations are not guaranteed and need to be secured by pro-active management as well as a clear understanding of the dynamic nature of the industry,” said Jonathan Robinson, the chief operating officer at web services company NetNames.
The domain was initially used for an email service, but the registrant later decided to park the domain when it started to receive tons of traffic. It was therefore decided that the registrant tried to profit from the popularity of MySpace’s brand by forwarding it to a parked page with advertisements. Unfortunately, the targeted ads also included text links to social networks, including paid links to MySpace.com.
[The registrant] said that the choice of ads that run on the myspace.co.uk website are determined by algorithms linked to search terms by internet users, which in recent years have been dominated by people looking for MySpace.
Gold, the arbitrator, said that it was not relevant that [the registrant] did not select the specific ads. Because it owned the website it was responsible for those ads and income made off the back of MySpace.
This is a dangerous ruling, in my opinion. First, the domain was registered before the launch of MySpace’s service and before the registration of their trademark. Secondly, the owner of a domain can usually not actively control the content displayed on parked pages. Thirdly, the popularity of MySpace would have cost the registrant money because of increasing traffic and bandwidth costs if he had continued to operate the email service under the domain. He would arguably have lost money from that additional traffic caused by Myspace had he not decided to park it instead.
What’s the lesson learned? Double-check the content and advertisements on any of your domains that might be trademark-sensitive, even if the trademark has been registered and established a long time after you bought the domain, because otherwise you’d be risking the loss of your domain name due to using it in “bad faith”.


Domain aftermarket 


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