The Hidden Cost of a Trademarked Domain Name

Someone registered Porsche.ing and reached out to Porsche offering to transfer it for €600. They framed it as reimbursement for their registration costs. Seemed reasonable enough to them I guess. Porsche filed a UDRP complaint instead. The panel ruled in Porsche's favor and the domain was transferred over for free. That person walked away with nothing — not even the €600 they asked for.

I've seen versions of this story play out more times than I can count and the outcome is almost always the same.

UDRP — the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy — is a process set up by ICANN that lets trademark holders challenge domain registrations they believe infringe on their rights. It's faster and cheaper than court and trademark holders win the majority of cases. When they win the domain gets transferred to them. You get nothing. Not even your registration fee.

The part that catches most people off guard is that intent doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you planned to build a fan site or a news platform or a totally legitimate business that happens to share a name with a big brand. What matters is whether the domain contains a registered trademark and whether a panel thinks it creates confusion. That bar is lower than most people expect going in.

Disney and Ford are two I think about often because I've had to make decisions about names in my own portfolio that touched on this. Both of those companies have entire legal teams dedicated to monitoring domain registrations. They file broadly and they win consistently. There's no gray area when it comes to their trademarks — if the name is in the domain they will come for it eventually.

The fix is simple. Before you register anything run a search on USPTO.gov. Search the exact name, search close variations. If there's an active trademark in a category that overlaps with what you're doing walk away. It takes ten minutes and it will save you a domain and potentially a lot of headache.

A $15 registration that gets UDRP'd is a $15 loss plus the domain. Do the search first every single time.