[BALUG-Talk] REMINDER: BALUG: meeting: TUESDAY 2020-02-18 Rich Morin...

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Akkana Peck (akkana@shallowsky.com):

> That's sadly common. I saw it with my old Toastmasters club in Santa
> Clara: some past member had set up a website, but had moved on
> without sharing the passwords with anyone else, so the website was
> full of incorrect information no one could fix and no one could
> point the domain elsewhere. We ended up registering a new domain
> (Rick's solution), though every now and then we had to explain
> to guests why the website they had found for us was so wrong.

Slight correction:  What I said was, if you don't control the domain and
its DNS, sue.

Which was a slight exaggeration, but I'll elaborate:  Owners of a
business like Willows Market have inherent trademark title (even if they
never registered a Federal trademark at USPTO[1]):  This gives muscle over
brand identity and appearance.

So, let's say I'm the proprietor of Willows Market and have gotten tired
of the site set up by a one-time outsourced contractor being
inaccessible.  Techies investigate for me, and find that the outsourced
contractor is paying $2.99/year to some cut-rate hosting house
(***COUGH*** GoDaddy ***COUGH***) that also does the DNS, and that
domain willowsmarket.com lists the outsourced contractor as Registrant
(domain owner), Administrative Contact, and Technical Contact -- and the
guy refuses to cooperate.

So, I first (as I mentioned) locally mirror all the site contents.
I set up a new Web site with new DNS using a temporary hostname, and
reload the site contents (with corrections) into that.  And now, I
as trademark stakeholder file a nice fat Uniform Domain-Name
Dispute-Resolution Policy ('UDRP') action at GoDaddy to seize ownership
of domain willowsmarket.com from the outsourced contractor.  

UDRP actions are a lot faster and cheaper than civil litigation, and are
stacked heavily in favour of trademark owners.  And this would be an
open-and-shut case.  So, to slightly correct what I said upthread, it's
actually not even necessary to sue.

[1] This is called a 'common-law tradmark'.