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domain name - other company take the similar name with -
adamus007p
Member
in General
Hello,
I would like to ask you based on your experiences what can I do when I have registered a domain e.g adamaddons.com and few years later other company selling the same they registered adam-addons.com.
What can I do? What are cost?
May you advise here or in PM?
I have no registered trademark. That company or person is from France.
They sell the same products addons for ecommerce.
The domain is .com
Comments
Nothing.
Or sue if you think you can win. Consult a lawyer, not strangers.
Absolutely nothing
You can buy that similar domain with hyphen and redirect to your own domain if they're offering it at affordable cost.
Do you own a trademark or have a copyright on the name legally? If you do and and feel they are infringing on your mark or copyright you can contact ICANN and work with them through paperwork and possibly lawyers to process a complaint and request for the domain. If you can make it through the process and prove you should own the other domain(s), in some cases they mandate a sale at
agreed valueor in other cases they just take the domains from the losing party. Be aware though, your gonna spend some money and piss people off in the process, so make sure you have the money / lawyers for such an adventure when you start out.my 2 cents.
Cheers!
Buy adam-addons.net inmediately.
No I have no trademark for that common name. My company name is different also.
I can ask a lawyer but they always say (based on my experience) that it is easy but when you start something it looks different, so I prefer ask someone who have experience and is not a lawyer.
In other words, you are literally looking for a recipe for disaster.
Luckily there is a walkthrough guide available:
https://runescape.wiki/w/Recipe_for_Disaster
do you hold the rights to the sales of addons or you're at the same reseller level as your competitor?
If you are both selling the same products as reseller/affiliate and do not hold copyright or ownership to that product, you basically can't do anything unless:
1) you make a complaint to the product owner and ask them to revoke your competitor rights to sell
2) use SEO to push your competitor search results off/overtake the page.
3) contact DMCA.com and see if they can do anything to help.
Bloody dicks with hyphens in their domain.
This is from my experience, I had been in a similar situation.
You can fight over the court if you can prove that, even if you did not have a trademark for it, your competitor started his business or started using exclusively the similar domain long after you had established a valid, sustainable and with big customer base company. You can rely on unfair practices, intention to embezzle the customer base and deceit. You will probably win the case. In EU law system and the most western countries, a name is not covered exclusively by trademark laws and when deceit can be proven, then, it is not uncommon that the court will justify your claims and forbid the other party using this similar domain.
But, the real question here is this: does your company's profit justify the expenses you will have to make for a law fight? If it's just $$ or $$$, then, certainly not. You have to lose big to be a valid solution to go to court over that. Especially when, as I suppose, you are not living in France, so, international law agreements will be involved and the paycheck for a lawyer to fight this will be huge...
And, to be fair, even if you had register the domain as trademark in your country and he grabbed the similar domain, the law case would be similar to the mentioned one as of arguments and expenses!
P.S.: As of my situation, I registered over a decade ago a news portal that became very popular in the first 6 months. Then, I and my partners discovered that a company had registered a publishing company with the same domain name as mine, without the .com part, without registering any domain for himself. We discovered only when he sued us! He used as his web presence a completely different name that he did jobs with and the registerd one was just the name of the legal company of his, without publicly using it.
When our news portal became famous, he tried to take the name from us asking us either to close it or give it to him. The court decided on our favor, because even if he registered the name, he didn;t actually used it, we used the two-part name as a whole adding always the .com at the end of it and he used a dash between thw two words.
The court also saw deceit in his try to get the domain from us, because he did not get the domain years before we did and he asked for it only when we gave value to it thru our work.
This did cost us some money, but it was a local law suit.
Since you don't have a registered trademark, there's no much you can do in this situation. I recommend that you check the domain using Whois lookup tool to find the company this domain is registered and hosted with (pay attention to Registrar and Nameservers results). You may contact the domain Registrar/hosting company 'Abuse department' to check whether you can file DMCA complaint. Probably, this won't give any results, but you can give it a try. You may use the following Whois tool:
https://whois.icann.org/en
Another workaround is to contact the current domain holder via Registrant email specified in Whois to check if it can be sold.
Good luck!
Hire a voodoo specialist from Fiver. $5.
What if you was to make them an offer they could not refuse?
You want maybe I should talk to them for you?
The important question to ask is, "WHY did they register the domain?"
If it is about "domain squatting", then I would ignore them. They will set up some kind of parked page, maybe with a search engine or links to related topics, but your customers will see that it is not what they wanted and try again. With a domain squatter, the more times you check, look at the page, check whois, etc., the more they will see the activity and ask a higher price to sell the domain, and be incentivized to keep it renewed, just in case you get desperate. Sometimes that's not a bad thing - make 'em waste their money keeping zombie registrations alive that will never be wanted.
If it is about setting up a competing business based on the same name, then you have more serious problems, especially since you don't have any ownership of the name. At that point, you should decide if it is worth the effort to protect your business. The first step is establishing your business name. Perhaps it is time to start over with a new business name that you can establish and control, then redirect your customers from the old site that resembles the squatted name. Whatever you decide, good luck!
I often wonder why I registered on WHT as well.
It's always why... why...
@eDigital I have copyrights to my products, that other person have other products.
That are ad-dons for ecommerce. Like I would say I sell ecommerce addons and that company sell their products too.
@jvnadr
I have similar thing I have found good name, and someone copy my idea adding - in the name.
Does you magazine still exist?
@parfe1 thank you for ideas.
@uptime I have send email. No response.
@emg They run ecommerce selling ecommerce addons like me. They just add - in the domain.
Do you mean trade mark?
I really should charge you for this piece of advice, but I think I will just ask as payment for you to seriously consider my advice.
You are upset, no doubt. Assuming what you have said is true, there is some grounds that the other party may be in the wrong. However, before you even think about any form of legal action, you have to find out if the other party is in the same legal jurisdiction as you. If not, you can spend all the money and time on legal pursuits, but it will end up a waste of your money and time because cross-border enforcement of judgements is almost impossible, especially when it is non-criminal. Throwing good money after bad is not the way to go.
I suggest you put a clear notice on your site that the other party is an imitation and may not offer the same quality as you do. This is about the best you can do, unless you can persuade the major search engines not to let this imitation site appear in search results. Bottomline is that it is very difficult to police the online space, and going down the legal route only enrich thr pockets of lawyers, whom you pay for their time and not results.
if I understand you correctly, you mean you and your competitor are just leveraging off the e-commerce platform brand by adding the word "addon" append to the domain e-com brand?
For example you are selling addons for Shopify so your domain should be shopifyaddons.com and your competitor domain shopifyadd-ons.com?
If that is the case then you have no legitimate ground since both of you are "leeching" off the brand of the e-com platform with no distinct addon brand of your own. On the other hand, the e-com platform can turn around and sue you instead for using their brand if they want to.
I would recommend you to build off a branding on your own and then redirect the traffic from "shopifyaddons.com" to your own brand domain. You can check how those vendors in themeforest are doing it.