People have long known about the issues with trademarks in domain names–one of the earliest forms of trademark abuse was cybersquatters grabbing well-known brand names and registering them as .com domains. In some cases these were resolved through paid settlements, and in other cases it’s spawned piles of lawsuits and the creation of special regulations to handle trademark disputes.
But this is only the beginning. Already, virtual worlds have been grappling with similar issues. Marvel sued the MMORPG City of Heroes back in 2004 because it was possible for players to make characters that looked similar to their licensed characters (and as of today, Marvel is at it again–trying to stop TechCrunch from running an Iron Man screening, presumably because they’re trying to control their trademark). And Second life has had to deal with brand names in their virtual world for a while. Most commercial MMORPGs will require you to change your name if they find out that you’ve used a popular character or brand name.
But what about social networks? Aren’t they really a Web-based, hypermedia version of a virtual world?
My guess is that social media will be the next area this phenomena rears its head. When you’re registering a new brand, and collecting all the important domain names (.com, .org, .net and so forth) as well as the somewhat less important ones (.biz, .us, .eu and the like) there’s another thing you might consider: grab your names on the more popular blogs and social networks.
For example, we grabbed GamerDNA on the more popular blogging sites, like Wordpress, blogger and even some of the newer ones like tumblr. It wouldn’t be fun to find out that someone grabbed our brand and started running a blog about games there. Similarly, we’ve got accounts at Digg, StumbleUpon, Myspace and Yelp (we wouldn’t want anyone to think our staff has poor taste!).
There’s a business in here somewhere–monitoring not only brand names, but all the incarnations of names across all the virtual worlds, social networks and other environments. At the same time, I’m cringing. Names are important to protect, but I wouldn’t want to see Marvel-like tactics used to annoy the universe of websites out there.
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