MySpace have won the right to have the UK version of their domain name transferred to their ownership following a ruling from the Nominet arbitrator despite the owner registering the name six years prior to MySpace’s formation.

The ruling is an interesting one in that the UK domain name was legitimately registered. However with the increasing popularity of MySpace, the owners significantly changed the site to social media advertising site. After placing a host of social media ads on the site (including MySpace), they then parked the site. Quoting The Register’s report:

The fact that the myspace.co.uk address led to a ‘parked’ page with adverts for social networking sites including MySpace was taken to be evidence of an abusive registration and the domain name was given to MySpace.

One wonders if the same ruling would have taken place had the owners run their own business, or perhaps even a blog using the domain name. MySpace’s only option then may have been to try and buy the domain name from the owner.

The lesson from this case is that if you have a domain name that has a popular dot com equivalent, don’t try to capitalise on the dot com’s fame and fortune. Use the domain name for your own business or as a portal for totally different business category to the dot com’s. Any hint of profiting from the dot com’s success may open the door to a similar ruling and the loss of ownership of your domain name.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 11:36 am and is filed under Domain Names. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.