Dec. 13, 2011 at 3:21 PM ET
Companies that missed the chance to register their trademarked names as ".xxx," a new Web domain, may find that others picked them up instead. Nobody wants a porn site with their name on it unless they do mean to do business as an adult entertainment site, the purpose of .xxx. And those who bought previously trademarked domain names may not find riches they're hoping for.
ICM Registry, the company in charge of issuing the sex site-related domain names, had a 52-day period in September and October for companies and organizations that wanted to claim an ".xxx" domain name for no other reason then to make sure no one else used their name. Among them: Disney, Target and Pepsi.
Many colleges and universities, too, rushed "to prevent their good names from falling into the hands of the pornography industry, the Associated Press said recently: "Over the past two months, they have snapped up tens of thousands of '.xxx' website names that could be exploited by the adult entertainment business."
But not everyone got in under the wire. For example, according to ICM Registry's records, a California man snapped up "Huffington Post.xxx." You won't get any result if you do a search for an actual "HuffingtonPost.xxx" website now, but in the coming weeks or months, who knows? When we contacted him, Justin Crews, the owner of the domain name, said he plans on selling the name to "anyone" who might be interested.
Msnbc.com and NBC News also did not apply for their related ".xxx" domain names, which were purchased by individuals, one in Florida, another in Georgia.
Chigozie Okoro of Snellville, Georgia, reached by telephone, said he bought "NBCNews.xxx" for $100 and purchased it strictly "to re-sell it."
"I'm not trying to use it for any pornographic purposes," he said.
Biagio Como of Boynton Beach, Florida, has the same idea. Como, who owns a social media management company, Throw Me In Traffic, says he purchased "msnbc.xxx" as well as "PalmBeach.xxx" not with the intent of doing "anything bad," but to "make money; that's the bottom line."
"I'm didn't buy them to mess with anyone's business," he said in a phone interview. "I saw the opportunity and I went for it."
Stuart Lawley, CEO of ICM Registry, said in a recent interview that more than 100,000 ".xxx" domain names have been sold, many of them before last week when ".xxx" became available to all to apply for. The "common prices" he said he was seeing for such registrations were between $75 and $100 a year.
"Some people may wish to register as a defensive maneuver; we don't encourage that," he said in a podcast interview with CNET's Larry Magid last week.
"We don't think the chance of somebody typing in someone else's company name followed by .xxx is genuinely expected to find anything relating to that company. But you know it's a free country, and people make their own decisions about their sort of brand names and their intellectual property."
ICM Registry has contracted with the National Arbitration Forum, based in Minneapolis, to handle domain name disputes, which are expected to arise with the addition of ".xxx" to the Internet.
The group is one of four authorized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, to handle disputes. The U.S. government established ICANN in 1998 to run the Internet's address system, and it was ICANN that authorized creation of .xxx last March.
And challenges will be likely.
"Technically if someone has registered a domain name that is a trademark of another entity and then is using that domain name to trade off the reputation of that domain name holder, that's the definition of cybersquatting, although it may not seem like it on the face of it," said Kristine Dorrain, the attorney who manages the forum's domain name disputes program.
Buyers of ".xxx" domain names agreed to arbitration to resolve such issues when they signed up to buy their domain names, she said. And while some may be hoping to benefit from their purchases by selling the ".xxx" names to trademark holders, it's unlikely to happen the way it did in the earlier, more Wild West-like days of the Internet, and before passage of a federal anti-cybersquatting law.
"In theory, there's first come, first serve, but people in the domain name world know they're not supposed to be taking trademark terms" for domain names, she said.
"In 1999, when this was all new, some people who cybersquatted and hoped to sell a domain name for a lot of money said, 'I thought I was just being an entrepreneur.' But in in 2011, very few people should have the excuse that squatting on trademarks is OK."
Msnbc.com's Alex Johnson also contributed to this report.
Related stories:
- Even if you don't have a sex site, .XXX can be yours
- Businesses are complaining of a .xxx shakedown
- Fate of .xxx Internet domain may be decided this week
- Sex.com sets world record for most expensive domain name