Legal Commentary

Foresight key to protecting names, brand - Twittersquatting

By David Canton

For the London Free Press - February 2, 2009

Read this on Canoe

Almost everyone has heard about people who register website domain names, such as “mcdonalds.com,” with no legitimate claim to them.

The same thing may now be happening with usernames on social networking services such as Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

The motivation for domain squatters is the profit to be made when someone else wants to use the domain in the future.

In some cases, the motivation might be to tarnish the trademark at issue. There have been cases of domain-name blackmail in which domain squatters have threatened to post pornography or other offensive content on a company’s domain name unless the company pays them not to.

Dispute-resolution mechanisms have been put in place to handle ownership disputes over domain names.

Today, with the expanding number and popularity of online social networking services, there may be a similar race to acquire usernames. A username identifies the users of social networking sites, and in that sense is similar to a domain name.

The motivations of username squatters are similar to domain squatters. Username squatting has the potential to create confusion for consumers and can be detrimental to a business’s image.

If a business has not started to use the social networking tool, it may not even be aware this is happening. If a business decides to start using the tool, it may be disappointed to learn that its logical username has already been taken.

In his article, A call for the creation of the Uniform Username Dispute Resolution Policy, Erik J. Heels coins the term “Twittersquatting,” to describe the problem of somebody else registering a company’s trade-mark or name as a username on Twitter (See erikjheels.com).

Heels proposes a standardized policy to make dispute resolution more efficient, regardless of what legal jurisdiction they happen to be located in, as an alternative to more costly legal proceedings.

Usernamecheck.com is a website where you can enter usernames and find out which have been taken on various social networking services. Heels used Usernamecheck.com to discover that “of the top 100 global brands, 93 per cent have had their Twitter usernames taken by somebody else.”

To eliminate username squatting, businesses and organizations should keep on top of popular and emerging social networking services and obtain usernames for as many as they can.

Unlike registering domain names, it does not cost anything other than the time to do it. One doesn’t actually have to use the service right away, or at all, but at least it gets them the username for future use, and lessens the chances that someone else will obtain it for some other purpose.

Of course, there are always solutions for those who have their usernames pirated by squatters. But those solutions may involve litigation or a pricey buyout — solutions that will cost considerably more than the few minutes it would have taken to register the username itself in the first place.

Few in the early ’90s anticipated the value of securing domain names. We cannot always predict what online social networking service will be the next big thing. But it’s always cheaper and more effective to be proactive when it comes to protecting your name, brand or trade-mark.

To eliminate username squatting, businesses and organizations should keep on top of popular and emerging social networking services and obtain usernames for as many as they can.

Full post as published by eLegal Canton on February 02, 2009 (boomark / email).