Luxury retailers go after alleged cybersquatting--again

Shortly after settling a cybersquatting lawsuit with domain name registrar Dotster, luxury department stores Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman have hit out at another set of registrars.

The high-end retailers claim that Denver-based Name.com, Name.net and Spot Domain have been registering and using domain names that are "confusingly similar" to those stores' names--and to companies representing every letter of the alphabet, from Abercrombie and Fitch to Zales Jewelers.

The complaint filed last week with a federal district court in Colorado alleges that the disputed domain names are laced with advertisements for companies that directly compete with Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman. It also claims the registrants purposely masked their identities in Whois databases to avoid getting caught.

Like the retailers' earlier suit against Dotster, the complaint goes further than your run-of-the-mill cybersquatting suit. It accuses the registrars, which reportedly share employees and offices, of abusing their special status with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to secure misspelled domains temporarily, measure the page views, and cancel the ones that don't generate ample advertising revenue within a five-day grace period, allowing the registrars to get a refund on the registration fees.

Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman have requested an injunction and $100,000 in damages for each contested domain name. Name.com representatives did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

Meanwhile, the stores' case against Dotster formally ended with a settlement agreement filed in court on Thursday, according to court records and attorney David Steele, who represented the retailers in the spat.

Under the settlement, Dotster agreed to a permanent injunction that bars it from registering domain names that are "confusingly similar" to the department stores' names in the future. The registrar also agreed to stop using an automated process to register domain names in bulk until it can figure out a way to screen out cybersquatting behavior, Steele said. The rest of the details are confidential.