OWNING YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS POWER®
Antares Law Firm offers services in domain name maintenance and enforcement. With rapidly evolving technology, doing business on the internet becomes a necessity. Domain names are recognizable gateways into the vast internet that provides consumers addresses to access clients’ company websites and marketplaces. Consider our firm’s domain name, www.antareslawfirm.com, for example. The domain name provides our potential clients an address to explore and access our legal services. Consumers tend to remember names and words in domain names more easily than they do strings of numbers, thereby making domain names correlating to a clients’ trademark incredibly valuable assets.
Domain Name Maintenance
Domain names build a company’s goodwill and value like other forms of intellectual property. Their use and recognition in connection with a company’s branding is important to the survival and growth of a business. That is, the maintenance and protection of domain names is as important as the maintenance and protection of the company’s trademarks, patents, copyrights, and trade secrets.
We help clients monitor existing and new domain name registrations for infringing domains. The firm focuses not only on domain names that incorporate clients’ trademarks but also monitor for typo-squatting domains, which intentionally misspell the trademark to mislead consumers to third party websites.
Domain Name Enforcement
Our firm helps clients facing cybertheft. The firm effectively handles domain name matters to protect clients’ trademarks. We can help clients successfully stop third parties from using infringing domain names and acquire the infringing domain names for our clients. These infringing domains can be used by our clients to redirect traffic back to their own websites. This can be accomplished through amicable negotiations with the infringing domain name owners, or through formal administrative proceeding under the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (called UDRPs) before either the Forum (previously known as the National Arbitration Forum) or the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Administrative proceedings can help clients attain rights in and access to infringing domain names. In some instances, a client may need to pursue legal action in court for trademark infringement, cybersquatting, unfair competition, and various other civil violations of the law. Civil lawsuits can help clients attain the infringing domain name, as well as monetary damages, including trebled profits and, in some instances, attorney’s fees.
Domain Name Harassment
In some unfortunate instances, a large company may attempt to force a small company with limited resources to give up domain names that the small company has acquired in good faith to do legitimate business. We represent small business owners at risk of losing a domain name in which they have built goodwill and value.
Often such proceedings begin with a demand letter that can lead to an administrative proceeding before the Forum or WIPO. In other instances, a large company will take trademark conflicts directly to court with the strategic understanding that a small business owner will not be able to pay for an attorney to represent its interest. In such situations, often a small company will agree to an insufficient settlement that favors the large company. Should you find yourself in such a situation, our firm can walk you through the strength of your case and offer you cost-effective strategies to defend your rights in the domain name.