said by Tarheels Fan :

The company will close shop and disappear. It was a default judgment meaning OnlineNic didn't even put up a fight.

said by r81984 :

Why should Verizon get the rights to anything with Verizon in it???

I don't get the rights to myname.com so WTF.

said by jvanbrecht :

For one, the company was a registrar, which means they likely paid nothing to register the domains in question.

Secondly, its not that they (Verizon and anyone else) are entitled to any domain that uses their name, however any domain that uses their name to advertise competing products is a problem, and if verizon does not aggresively persue trademark dilution/infringement cases, they lose their trademark.

The monies awarded were punitive more so then anything else. As for getting the money, the judge siezed the companies assets. However, they most likely are not going to even come close to getting the $33m.

said by r81984 :

A web address is not trademark infrindment, its just a plain text web address. Now if they had Verizon posted all over the site then you have a problem. All I have read is they cybersquatted which it is their right to do. People cybersquatted domains all the time.
If they did not then I would have myname.com.

said by jvanbrecht :

You are incorrect. As someone else said, you never trademarked your name, so you have no right to yourname.com. Secondly, you should have acted quicker, I happen to have myname.com hell I also have mywifesname.com (but she has of course changed it now that we are married)...

If the company had registered the domain to use it for something that would fall under fair use rights, then they may have a claim to registering a domain under another companies trademark.

This company, if you read the article, registered 900000 domains related to very large brand names, that shows bad faith and the intention to dilute those trademarks and to use them to make a profit (via advertising).

Anything else you would like to throw my way, I am having a ball shooting you down...

said by r81984 :

A web address is not trademark infrindment, its just a plain text web address. Now if they had Verizon posted all over the site then you have a problem. All I have read is they cybersquatted which it is their right to do. People cybersquatted domains all the time.
If they did not then I would have myname.com.

said by r81984 :

Why should Verizon get the rights to anything with Verizon in it???

I don't get the rights to myname.com so WTF.

And it makes no sense to award damages. At most they should say you have to allow Verizon to buy the domains from them for what you paid for them and if Verizon is not willing to buy them then they should be allowed to keep them.

said by magnushsi :

All the people telling you that it has to be trademarded are incorrect. A service mark or even just being "known as" is just as good as a trademark. I recently went though a cyber-squatting situation and am very aware of the laws.

said by GOLFnSUN :

You are right. It was a default judgment with the accused never even appearing in court(»www.internetretailer.com/dailyNe···id=28865). And no one can be found to actually pay any award. It sounds good in a press release, but means nothing in collecting any dollars.

said by URL :

I know someone that when domain names first started out, registered thousands of names of large companies. The goal was to simply sell them to the company which had that name.

He was very very sucessfull at this (lives in Beverly Hills, CA now).

The trick is to resgister, not maintain a website, and if you do - lets say bananarepublic.com -- have a site that looks like your a banana importer. It was years before bananarepublic got the rights to use their .com name, because someones else had a "fake" company. It cost them serious $$ to get their name.

The point is. It's much more diffiuclt to do this now than it was earlier on. A company does have some rights to their name, but it's not 100% given.

said by magnushsi :

The only way this was not illegal for your friend was if he did it before Nov 29, 1999. (which it probably was) If he did it afterwards, the companies that paid him were either ignorant of the law or felt it was cheaper to pay than go through a UDRP or ACPA litigation. Now if a company didn't exist before he bought the domain names, that is different. But why would he have bought the name if the company didn't already exist? The only way the company won't get it now a days, is if you can prove you have a "right" to use it, meaning your business has that name as well or something like that.