Cybersquatting Alive And Well In The Uk
Martin Burns
Member info
User since: 26 Apr 1999
Articles written: 143
UK firm WebHound have been discovered registering .co.uk domain names for 15,000 UK villages at a cost of £5 each, and attempting to resell to the villages at 100 times the price.
According to the BBC, the Scottish village of Balfron discovered the pirates when it tried to register balfron.co.uk - a fairly unique name.
UK case law has sufficient precendent to cover domain name squatting of known brand names, but it's not certain what the implications are for place names.
Here's WebHound's address. LART at will.
Martin Burns has been doing this stuff since Netscape 1.0 days. Starting with the communication ends that online media support, he moved back through design, HTML and server-side code. Then he got into running the whole show. These days he's working for these people as a Project Manager, and still thinks (nearly 6 years on) it's a hell of a lot better than working for a dot-com. In his Copious Free Time™, he helps out running a Cloth Nappies online store.
Amongst his favourite things is Zope
He's been a member of evolt.org since the very early days, a board member, a president, a writer and even contributed a modest amount of template code for the current site. Above all, he likes evolt.org to do things because it knowingly chooses to do so, rather than randomly stumbling into them. He's also one of the boys and girls who beervolts in the UK, although the arrival of small children in his life have knocked the frequency for 6.
Most likely to ask: Why would a client pay you to do that?
Least likely to ask: Why isn't that navigation frame in Flash?
