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Resolving Domain Name Conflicts
Competing claims to domain names may be resolved in the courts or by domain name administrators; optimally, disputes may be resolved by negotiation.
As mentioned above, a domain name registrant who has registered the distinctive portion of the domain name, or a very similar variant thereof, as a trademark in the U.S. and Canada, will in most cases prevail in any contest as to the right to the use of the domain name. However, a given trademark may be validly used by one enterprise for one product line, and by another enterprise for a dissimilar product line. So it often happens that one enterprise may own a valid trademark registration for given wares or services and other enterprises may own valid trademark registrations for other wares or services. In such cases, the competing claims to ownership of a desirable domain name may be difficult to resolve.
In some cases, a number of unaffiliated companies each with an ostensibly legitimate right to use the same or a similar trademark may agree that these companies may share the very same domain name and website; in such cases, the website will guide anyone accessing the site to the appropriate company through an appropriate menu selection process. Take a look at www.scrabble.com by way of an example of a shared website in which unaffiliated companies use the trademark SCRABBLE in different parts of the world. On the home page, using a map of the world, the website viewer may select different information for different countries, and the following message appears: "'SCRABBLE' is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A. by Hasbro Inc., in Canada by Hasbro Canada Inc. and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons, PLC of Enfield, Middlesex, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro or Hasbro Canada."
When testing competing claims, courts often examine the motives of the claimants. The first use of a distinctive word in a domain name by the first person to register the domain name will be of no avail if that person does not plan to use the name in active trade, but instead hopes to make a profit from it otherwise, as by selling the name to someone else. As mentioned, someone else's legitimate right to use the distinctive portion of the domain name as a trade name or trademark will prevail over a squatting right to the domain name established by the first registrant of the domain name.
In the case of serious international disputes about conflicting uses of domain names, the World Intellectual Property Organization's Arbitration and Mediation Centre is available to resolve such disputes.
Unauthorized Links
Links between various websites have given rise to controversy. Not only overt links can give rise to connections between websites, but metatags can also promote a given website for "hits" by search engines that respond to information contained in the metatags. (Metatags are latent collections of key words, or the like, not ordinarily visible on a website, that attract internet search facilities). Trademark owners have been successful in enjoining the owners of websites with such metatags from continuing to include the complainant's trademark within the metatags.
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