I own and manage a portfolio of over 500 domains many of which I have owned since 2002 or before. I bought my first domain in 1999 and over those years I have lost, traded or sold quite a few. If someone asked me what my business was I would say I am a domain investor first and site developer second. I began building websites just to pay for the domains I wanted to buy.
At one point in 2003 I discovered lots of traffic in domains with trademarks. I bought some domains like uhaulrental.com and rydermovingtrucks.com and built some websites on them. I scored big on the traffic but lost it all when the domains were taken from me by the trademark owners. I was wrong and I never even bothered to answer the complaint because I knew I was wrong.
Since then I no longer purchase domains with obvious trademarks in them but that has not stopped me from running into people that claim I am infringing on their trademarks with the use of my domains. In the 5 cases I can think of specifically each and every time someone cried to me about using their trademark in my domain I politely reminded them that having a trademark on a word doesn’t mean they own the word. I still have the rights to use any word I wish in any business class I wish so long as I don’t infringe on their actual trademark claims. You’ll be surprised at how many trademark holders are unaware of just what their trademark is and what it means.
Of these five cases each made the right choice and negotiated a price by which I would transfer the domain to them. The last two cases I dealth with the trademark holders legal team and it made things easier actually. There is now a new case related to a health domain I own and I’m dealing with the owner direct. The trademark holder owns KeywordDomainUSA.com where I own the KeywordDomain.com minus the USA. Why someone would bother to trademark the USA version without at least trying to buy the KeywordDomain alone makes little sense to me but so do most people with stupid trademarks and no idea how or why to enforce them.
I’m trying to get this guy to realize his best move is to make me an offer and that by fighting me all he does is risk losing any chances at the domain and more likely he will cost his company $1500 or more in fees to the WIPO and his lawyers. Any suggestions on how to convince them to just pay up and not fight it?
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