Cybersquatters beware: If your Net domain name is too similar to a well-known domain name, you could end up paying damages if you're caught, if a bill the U.S. Senate has passed becomes law. \nORRIN HATCH:\nstanding for domain name trademark rights.
On the other hand, if you're putting up a parody site using a trademark name, you're pretty much safe - for now.
By a no-dissent voice vote last Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent the Domain Name Piracy Prevention Act of 1999 to the full Senate. The Senate passed the bill last Friday and goes to the House. The bill would give domain registries limited liability exemption if they cancel a name they think infringes on another. It would also let trademark owners recover damages in cybersquatting cases.
If it becomes law in current form, the bill would impose fines of up to $100,000 per Internet name on anyone who registers a name "in bad faith" by hoping to profit from association with another trademark name, says Reuters.
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch says that "in many cases," a domain name taking Web surfers to the website and the graphics which greet them "are the only indications of source and authenticity," making "legitimate and illegitimate" sites indistinguishable.
"(I)f a bad actor is hiding behind a domain name bearing someone else's trademark," the Utah Republican says, "an online consumer is at serious risk of being defrauded." As with other trademark violations, he says, consumer confidence in name brand identifiers "and in electronic commerce generally" is eroded by the practice.
Hatch and other critics of the practice say cybersquatters establish domain names similar to known brands solely to sell them to the brands, if not to profit otherwise from the brand identification.
The bipartisan bill sprang from a legislative proposal introduced in June by Michigan Republican Spence Abraham. That proposal was criticized by legal experts who warned it was too broad and might have meant criminal prosecutions for people using trademark names in files posted on the Net, e-mail addresses, or hyperlinks leading from site to site. The earlier bill would also have outlawed parody sites using trademark names.
