Man Asks $75M for 'Lambo.com,' Court Gives It to Lamborghini for Free
roadandtrack.comThe website https://nissan.com shows how to avoid this outcome.
I think changing his name to Richard Lambo may not have avoided this outcome.
RIP Uzi, Legend.
Go, Daddy!
This is one recurring thing with the domain squatters - they just sit on the domains and don't bother to do anything that legitimizes them.
I guess this is something LLMs can help with, though. Shouldn't be hard to vibe code something that looks "legit" and drive traffic to the site.
If he had spent some time to throw content of his choosing on there, he would have likely kept it.
How does the $10,000 he spent for the domain work? I assume he just eats it. That doesn't feel right.
It’s a $10k fine for acting in bad faith.
It's state-facilitated theft from an individual to a $20 billion multinational corporation.
Sure he tried to do something bad but he should've been compensated a fair market value for the domain.
Wait it’s illegal to squat on domains? Isn’t this what 90% of domains are currently owned for? How do I get a squatted domain as a startup?
You can't squat on trademarks, basically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticybersquatting_Consumer_Pr...
So if someone is squatting purpleunicorn.com and I register a trademark for purpleunicorn, I can force them to give me the domain? Or does the trademark have to exist prior to the domain purchase?
That seems entirely inferable from that wikipedia link. How would you have a bad faith intent to profit from a trademark that didn't yet exist?
Edit: typo
> That seems entirely inferable from that wikipedia link.
I did read the link and it wasn’t clear to me which is why I asked.
> How would you have a bad faith intent to profit from a trademark that didn't yet exist?
Isn’t that what most squatters are doing when they purchase something like “zero.ai” or “spectra.ai”? Even if the trademark doesn’t exist yet, they have no intent to use the domain for a business and are assuming someone will want to create a business or trademark with that name one day.
You find this legal decision and read it!
$75M seems like a pipe dream. Lamborghini could get a vanity TLD (.lambo) for around $2M all in. Much cooler than a .com, IMHO
Lambo's Deli in Toronto just got screwed.
Does Lamborghini have a trademark claim on the word "Lambo" or it just on 'similarity' grounds?
Trademarks are about recognizability, not about some objective similarity. There's no magic Levenshtein distance from a trademark.
However, they are also scoped to domains, so if there was some non-car business with such a name, they would also be entitled to the name, and the domains tend to be first-come first-serve in those kinds of cases.
Think of all the "Acme" or "A-1" companies that all have different products, and the general public doesn't have an issue conflating them.
(not a lawyer; not legal advice)
Note that the status on this is entered/not assigned, so it's in the works. However, the court may have required that they do so before proceeding.
The offending use does not have to be a 1:1 match to dilute.
(not a lawyer; not legal advice)
Got too greedy. Could have sold it for millions to a random person holding the empty bag.
It's considered bad faith to sell a domain that you purchased? He didn't even offer it to Lamborghini, just for general sale.
If you purchased it for the sole purpose of reselling it, that makes you a domain squatter, so yes.
...
A terrible domain squatter and an equally terrible ruling
I wonder if web3 will eliminate the possibility of these situations ever happening in the future