Hi All,

As we all know people pay crazy prices for com's that are 3 letters .com - no matter what the three letters are, with domainers presuming every combination of letters are an abreviation for SOMEONE's business and it will be saleable.

The two questions are:
1) If it was possible to get a random 3 letter .com.au for regfee, is this worth it if there is no obvious development target, simply because someone may want it? Or would this logic only apply for .com's

2) How would one ensure they didn't fall foul of cybersquatting laws for a random III.com.au domain name in in this type of case - make up a site name that matches and say coming soon - but this domain may be for sale?

Thanks
Matt
www.marketingweb.com.au

1) no
2) possible but varies by case, bad faith and good faith are complex to establish, surely a site helps as long as it does not show same stuff of tm holder

Example:

if you had "iphone.com" and were promoting iphones on the site, you could say welcome to Apple`s Legal team...

Thanks for the reply..... i'm more talking if it was say dpl.com.au or fxj.com.au or qae.com.au or something like that.... not a trademarked brand name like iphone. Does that change things? I know in .com world they go crazy for those type of names for some reason!

As acronyms aren't actually trademarkable you can easily pick these up and make a filler site based around that acronym and its possible meanings. I think the only way you get in trouble (based on what I understand from the auda rules) is that if you are profiting from another persons trademark with your .au domain then that is bad faith. To have a site say about Ford's, which doesn't have advertising I think you can easily get away with.

But again, thats based on my understanding of the rules.

not trademarked = much less risks, like say you are 99 % ok

TM being there = still you may be OK, but it may be risky

example of few years ago:

Gmail.de

Google had to kiss Registrant`s butt and pay him a cool $1M because he regged the domain BEFORE the TM.

If you reg after the TM, then risk is wayyyy increasing.

What if I registered the name of an American TV Show - i.e- www.dexter.com.au (I don't have that obviously.)

1,220,000 Exact match queries per month locally...

Is there any point in having this domain? How can I legally develop it to take advantage of the traffic...?

I'd say a random LLL.com.au would be worth at least reg-fee, though I suppose there's a risk you wouldn't be able to unload it for several years, especially if it's something that's unlikely to ever have an acronym attached to it.

You could have the domain name Dexter. Your name could be Dexter, or it could be a nickname.

You could possibly become the "unofficial" fan page to Dexter.

Could very easily place and affiliate link for Dexter box set DVD's etc.

Thanks Shaun and Paz,

That was my assumption. Great to know. I thought a forum/community would be great both for indexing and to build a community of new/returning users that could potentially be marketed via email newsletter and with banners...

I love 2010 :-)