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Hoping to make a buck off the trade in Internet domain names? While there are no guarantees that speculation in unused names will turn a profit, two recent decisions by an intellectual-property-arbitration group offer promise to selective URL-collecting entrepreneurs.

The rulings by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which works under the authority of the nonprofit group that manages the Internet's domain-name system, found that Steve Gregory, a Philippines resident who operates www.rockbottomdomains.com has the right to register and sell domains containing words trademarked by companies in other countries.

"These are the first cases of an arbitrator saying that registering a domain name for the sole purpose of selling it to somebody else is fine," says David J. Loundy, a Chicago attorney who represented Gregory. Geneva-based WIPO is an intergovernmental group that settles intellectual-property disputes between private parties from different countries.

LOSE OVER SNOOZE. In the first case, Munich-based Allocation Network held a German trademark on "allocation" and disputed Gregory's right to own allocation.com. In the second, an Australian mattress company, Capt'n Snooze, held a trademark on "snooze" and challenged Gregory's claim to snooze.com. The decisions hinged, in part, on the fact that the names in dispute were common, generic English words, unlike, say, Nike or Coca-Cola.

Gregory's intent was at issue, too. While he clearly registered the names and hundreds of others with the aim if selling them, Gregory insisted the words were chosen at random.

That distinction is critical because cybersquatting, in which an individual registers a company's name or trademarked symbol for the purpose of selling it to the business at a high price, remains off-limits. For example, an individual who registered worldwrestlingfederation.com lost the rights to it after World Wrestling Federation Entertainment filed a complaint with WIPO. Other cybersquatting attempts that failed: niketown.com, wheatthins.com, alaskaairlines.org, chicago-tribune.net, and juliaroberts.com.


By Julie Fields