Legal Matters: Keep It in Your Domain

Hertz, Avon and Panasonic were all early victims of this practice and joined many Fortune 500 companies that frequently paid tens of thousands of dollars to purchase domain names corresponding to their brands.

Early cybersquatters operated in an environment where the legality of their practice, however egregious, was unclear. There were few reliable and cost-effective tools available to trademark owners to combat the practice. Until the late ’90s, for example, it wasn’t clear that existing U.S. trademark law prohibited cybersquatting.