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Squatting: The Old and The New

Jay

Most of us are familiar with the term “domain squatting,” when people would buy domain names of big companies with the hopes of getting rich by one day selling the domain name off to the big company. Some people got rich and some people went to court for trademark infringement. A more complete and technical definition can be found on Wikipedia under “cybersquatting.”

A new type of squatting is being done now, by signing up for a blog and requesting your blog url (something.blogspot.com) to contain a trademarked company name and then leaving the blog empty. I was recently found a Blogger account which had over a hundred company named blogs registered, none of which are active!

This person had the blog domain I needed for a company who I legitimately represent and since it was an inactive blog, Blogger was very helpful in releasing the name to me, but the user still owns over a hundred blogs that are inactive.

And I wonder how Time Warner, AOL, Burger King, HBO and Jay Leno feel about this blogger account owning their name?

Should Blogger do something about this? What do you think?