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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

A Google domain name is lying on the ground. An IT guy walks past it. A friend asks: "Didn't you see the Google domain name there?" The IT guy replies: "I thought I saw something, but I must've imagined it. If there had been a Google domain on the ground, someone would've picked it up."

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For anyone unfamiliar, this is a clever riff on a classic economics joke about the Efficient Market Hypothesis [1].

"Two economists are walking down the street and one of them notices what appears to be a $20 bill (or a $100 bill—the monetary amounts vary) on the sidewalk. “It’s not a real $20 bill,” the other economist declares. “If it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up off the sidewalk already.”

[1]: https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/if_...

Except the $20 bill in this case is a $-10 bill (or whatever the domain name costs), as there is no profit to be made by registering a top company's trademark as a domain name.

Yup. It's more like lots of people were walking along and saw exactly what it was, and knew better than to touch it.

Ha exactly — like a briefcase with $1million on the sidewalk. No way I’m touching that!

I too don’t want Javier Bardem hunting me down.

Well we know he'd do it for $2M. But for $1M...what are the odds?

Need to watch that again. Thanks for reminding me. His role was awesome.

I will never watch that again. Too depressing. His role was awesome.

Or Lloyd Christmas

Or Mullan and O’Malley (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shallow_Grave)

While it is an unwinnable case, there is a positive dollar amount to settling out of court.

Especially if you have a cute story like the MikeRoweSoft guy did.

He bought mikerowesoft.com though, not microsoft.soy. It would not have ended the way it did if he'd bought the latter. His case was a lot less clear cut than a blatant exact string match on an unambiguous trademark. Also, Mike Rowe is actually his name; Netflix is not this guy's name.

I think Nissan.com is more illustrative -- it was a guy named Nissan[1] who had an actual computer business in his name and got to keep it away from Nissan Motors, but now his site has a lot more to do bragging about his fight with the motor company than actual computer stuff.

[1] Hebrew/Israeli name usually transliterated as "Nisan"

Interesting, why doesn't Nissan motor just paid more money say a million for it?

Surely they can afford it.

Took a quick look at the case. I'm guessing some corp lawyer, maybe even general counsel, didn't have enough "real work" to do and needed to make a name for himself. Then it became a giant d* measuring contest.

Source: Went to law school. Never practiced though.

They got bad self-serving advice from lawyers. A lawyer doesn't get paid much if all they do is write up a contract for a private agreement to buy a domain, but they get paid a lot if the disagreement goes to trial instead.

In case you've never heard of them: https://microsoft-informatica.com/

Yes, they were here first.

No there isn't. Companies won't pay you money for having cybersquatted on their obvious trademark. You'll lose the domain flat out through UDRP.

The best outcome that can happen to you if you find yourself in such a situation is that you relinquish the domain name for free and nothing further comes from it.

Arbitration through UDRP is expensive, both in terms of process costs and employee time. A reasonable company would probably pay more than registration costs to avoid it.

Not if you take into account that they also want to deter future cybersquatting.

Covering actual costs without significant profit is a deterrent. If it costs $20 to register and you ask for $30 I think you're likely to get it.

You're underestimating how much value there is to companies in setting precedent on defending their trademark with an easy and practically guaranteed win. Companies need to proactively defend their trademark when it's being infringed upon or they risk losing it, and this is a really easy way to defend it.

The precedent is already established, you're missing the point: in order to enforce such precedent you have to go to court anyway.

And that costs money.

Looks like you haven't heard of https://nissan.com/.

They've had the domain for years.

Sure, if your name is Mike Google, then you might have better chances at keeping your domain. Probably still not good chances to profit off of it.

Now this a valid reason to give your kid the surname of a brand. To get rich quick. Too bad that this also limits employment options in the long run (can you imagine Google to work for Amazon?)

Except having the name is not enough, you also need to have used it in business already.

Happens all the time, as many brand names come from family names and the founder isn't the only person bearing that name.

>you also need to have used it in business already.

What is this based on? Because surely I have the right to own mylastname.suffix without being a business even if someone decides to make a business that bears my family name.

It remember me the story of Mike Rowe who named his company Mike Rowe Soft. Here the details: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._MikeRoweSoft

If it were your middle name then you could have the option to omit when needed.

Might be less limiting than you think.

There was famously an apple store employee called "Sam Sung" - https://www.cultofmac.com/290116/sam-sung-auctioning-apple-s...

Except that isn't cybersquatting. His name is Nissan and he did business as 'Nissan' before Nissan called themselves Nissan in the USA.

Wow, the look of that website made me feel like a teenager again!

> $-10 bill (or whatever the domain name costs)

For the curious, .soy seems to be one of the more expensive TLDs. It's $34.54 at Gandhi, $25.98 at Namecheap, $35.99 at Network Solutions, and $20 at Goggle. (I also tried at Bluehost, HostGator, and Godaddy, but none of them seem to even offer .soy).

It looks like netflix.soy was registered via Google, so that would be a $-20 bill.

Would a proper analogy be: free boat! (needs work, might be radioactive)?

I wouldn't necessarily think like that.

A domain can be either resold to another third party or could be sold to the trademark owner itself. You might reach a price agreement that brings you some money and costs the trademark owner less than getting a lawyer involved.

That reminds me of my father's advice when I wanted to buy a house. He said if the house was so good why hasn't anyone bought it yet.

A little anecdote. I actually had this exact situation happen to me when I was a kid.

I was walking in a crowded street just outside a shopping center and there where a bunch of $50 bills being blowed by the wind. No one was paying any attention to them so I picked one of them up. You can imagine my surprise when I realised that they were real.

All in all it ended up to be roughly $3000 and my mum took the money to the police station. No one claimed it and a few months later we got to keep it.

With the expansiion of TLDs, this just means that apex domains of a TLD will still be subject to trademarks.

google.pizza, google.yoga, google.keyboard will all be trivially easy for Google to claim trademark infringement for.

So while it's cute that you can register "google.soy" -- if Google cares enough they'll take if from you.

> apex domains of a TLD

aka domain names.

I don't doubt google would attempt to do this, and probably win simply by being able to out resource an individual who registered the domain, however, my limited understanding of trademark law is this wouldn't necessarily be a valid claim.

My understanding is trademarks are a protection against consumer confusion, so as long as companies aren't selling similar products or services, or competing in the same geography there isn't a problem. This is difficult with google, but a non-tech scuba company operating under google.scuba or googlescuba.com wouldn't necessarily infringe on google the tech company unless they're actively doing something to make consumer believe they're dealing with google the tech company.

Google is difficult with it's large breadth of interests, but for most tech companies this is likely more about exploiting flaws with the legal system by out resourcing opponents more than legitimate claims (thinking the oracles, salesforces, dells, Intels, etc).

IANAL but I'm pretty sure those examples could still be trademark infringement. Since Google is a global company and brand, someone could easily assume since your site is called google.scuba or googlescuba.com, you are in some way affiliated with or endorsed by Google. Perhaps you'd be OK if you made it very clear that wasn't the case, but I wouldn't want to bet on it.

I don't know what legal relationship it has to US trademark law, if any, but I've heard ICANN has its own sort of arbitration process for domain squatting disputes.

While this is generally true, it doesn’t apply to a famous and unique mark which would definitely be covered by trademark dilution in this case.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_dilution

Although apple.records would not be available to Apple Computer. Trademark classes will make this all more interesting.

In fact, they're the only good argument in favour of expanded TLDs that I can think of.

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