Morgan Stanley won a decision against a cybersquatter over a domain name that included the letters “MS" — even though the financial services firm apparently doesn’t own any trademark registrations for those letters, which are simply an abbreviation for its MORGAN STANLEY trademark.

Trademark applications are insufficient to establish trademark rights under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), and a failure to provide relevant evidence of trademark usage is fatal to proving common law trademark rights under the policy. Those are two very basic but important reminders in a short but helpful UDRP decision that was just recently published.

Dot-com – which has long been synonymous with the Internet itself – is king of domain names, and it’s also the leader in domain name disputes, as I discuss in a new video. Out of 11,799 domain names in UDRP decisions last year, 8,543 of them – or more than 72 percent of the total – were dot-coms.

A cybersquatter in two recent decisions under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) registered domain names that contain the trademark “Vuity” and created websites offering to sell a new prescription eye drop that can replace reading glasses — without a prescription.

Now matter how you look at it, domain name disputes hit record numbers in 2021, and I’ve summarized all of the most important and interesting data in the fourth quarter report of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest.

When Facebook embraced the metaverse by rebranding its corporate name to Meta in October 2021, it did much more than acknowledge its own place in this emerging experience for social and business communities. It also opened the door to other companies and individuals interested in jumping on the bandwagon – including, of course, cybersquatters, who are nothing if not opportunistic.

In this episode of my ongoing series of video interviews with domain name dispute service providers, I talk with Kiran Sanghera, secretary general of the Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre (ADNDRC) and special counsel for the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (HKIAC); and Tom Leung, an ADR case manager for HKIAC.

Law firms don’t usually represent themselves in legal proceedings, but an increasing number of firms are being targeted by cybesquatters and taking action under the UDRP, the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, to enforce their rights as trademark owners.

Even before the year has come to an end, the number of domain name dispute cases has set another record in 2021. The increase can be attributed in part to the coronavirus pandemic, a number of large UDRP cases, and the importance of some new top-level domains.

In this UDRP case study video, I explain how the owner of a trademark registration for PTP lost a dispute over the domain name <ptp.com>. As I discuss, the issue in this case raises one of the most common misconceptions I hear about domain name disputes: that a company can file – and win – a complaint under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) against anyone who simply has a domain name that is identical to its trademark.