2008 Cybersquatting figures

With recent news about the sale of the domain Toys.com to ToysRus for $5.1million making headline news the world over last week, a refreshing perspective was offered on the domain industry, showing the legitimate money to be made by serious investors in generic domains, without any mention of the “darker” side of the industry so often deemed more newsworthy.

The cybersquatting underside of domain investment was, however, dragged back centre stage today as new figures were released, showing 2008 had the highest instance of cybersquatting complaints ever recorded - 2,329 cases in total, an 8% increase on 2007’s figures.

I would love to know figures for reverse domain hijacking, (where a company aggresively pursues domains with only a tenuous link to their intellectual property rights, in an effort to obtain a valuable asset for free) as I’ll wager the figures on that front have jumped even more than 8%. Many large corporations abuse their power and attempt to extort generic domains from their rightful owner by means of a wipo, yet very little media attention is given to this phenomenon.

Public awareness of typos and cybersquatting is getting more pronounced, even resulting in mainstream advertisements mocking the phenomenon in the UK:-