Increase of cybersquatting due to new top level domains

Last year, trademark owners filed 2,754 “cybersquatting” cases with WIPO, an increase of 4.6% over the previous year. Cybersquatting typically means the registration of a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.

The cases filed under WIPO’s Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) covered a total of 4,364 domain names. Disputes relating to new generic top level domains (gTLDs) accounted for 10.5% of the cases in 2015. Among the domain names, .XYZ, .CLUB and .EMAIL were the most common new gTLDs.

The most active brand in combatting cybersquatting in 2015 was Hugo Boss with 62 cases, followed by Philip Morris (60 cases) and AB Electrolux (48 cases). The top three sectors of complainant activity were fashion (10% of all cases), banking and finance (9%), and Internet and IT (9%).