Notorious cybersquatter loses out as Cruise wins domain name
We recently highlighted a slew of celebrities who don’t have control of domain names named after them – including Wayne Rooney and Tom Cruise.
Yesterday it was reported that Tom has won TomCruise.com from the notorious cybersquatter Jeff Burgar (who didn’t own Wayne’s web namesake as he’d probably never heard of him) – well known to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), despite not having done anything about it for nearly ten years.
Whatever you think of people speculatively snapping up domain names that might prove useful to someone else, Burgar did argue his case quite eloquently, claiming that if Tom hadn’t done anything about the TomCruise.com domain for 10 years, he probably wasn’t too concerned about it being used maliciously.
He also argued that anyone typing ‘TomCruise.com’ into their web browser isn’t expecting to find the star’s contact details, but is looking for information about him, which Burgar claims he provided at the celebrity site all his domain names pointed to.
Still, he was ruled against and so Tom Cruise now has a domain to play with. Maybe he’ll go after TomCruiseIsNuts.com next (no, really…)
I’m not sure who’d make a better job of TomCruise.com – it’s just a sorry ‘Forbidden’ page at present. Maybe that’s how it should stay, Tom…
One thought on “Notorious cybersquatter loses out as Cruise wins domain name”
There’s a nice picture of Burgar at http://www.highprairietimes.com/newsone.html
This is his home town. The rival paper, ‘High Prairie Times’ dis a story on it.
Jeff’s newspaper obviously didn’t.
Comments are closed.