Do you own a .COM domain name ?
I invite you to visit yoursite.CM
what did you saw ?
Surprised ?
for more details visit : [url=http://www.antidotcm.com]www.antidotcm.com[/url]
Cheers Mehdi
This is normal practice for many of the national TLD's. .WS do it as well. You can still buy the domain it is just while no one has purchased it, the domains central registrar uses it.
The issue had been raised on http://public.icann.org/forums/public-forum#comment-306 and ICANN apparently couldn't care less.
That leaves two options:
1) If nameview.com is in Vancouver and are providing DNS for (and concealing the identity of) the perpetrators, agoga.com, then find someone with a Canadian registered trademark and have them sue Nameview for their rôle in this scam.
2) If ICANN is in the US and was given its current rôle by the US Department of Commerce, escalate the matter to the Department of Commerce. They had enough pull with ICANN to kill the proposed .xxx domain in its tracks, they should have enough to get agoga.com pulled.
The assumption behind all of this seems to be that .cm is Cameroon and beyond the reach of Canadian and US law. If the redirects are terminating on a domain registered to a Vancouver address and a US telephone number, that assumption is dangerously false. I'm amazed this has been allowed to go on for as long as it has.
Type scotiabank.cm and get ads for either their resellers or their direct competitors, served from Vancouver? "Scotiabank" and "Bank of Nova Scotia" are Canadian trademarks, so agoga.com is clearly breaking Canadian law.
All your comments about TradeMarks are valid except........
1. The central registry is not promoting a domain name but is directing the URL request to a non existant domain within it's space to a landing page. A very legitimate action. It would be equivelant to the following situation on a domain you own.
A user types www.adomainname.com/citibank.html. Your 404 redirects them to your homepage. They typed the domain and your 404 redirects this is not your fault otherwise a trademark owner could technically target every domain as an infringer of trademark by doing just that.
2. They are NOT promoting the domains that are not registered on google etc. If they where then they could conceivably be in trouble.
If you where to set up a page for a search engine to index that redirected it to another page you would be in breach if it could be proved that the intent was to harm the TradeMark owner.
What the .CM registrar is doing is legally very safe regardless of what anyone thinks about the morality of it. Personally ( and given that people like an example given - Scotiabank - they feel the same) who cares 99.9% of people would not even know of Cameroon (no offence to Cameronians and your football team) and of the ones that do, 95% of them would not even know of the .cm name space.
As this is only a problem on direct input it's not a big deal
"The central registry is not promoting a domain name but is directing the URL request to a non-existent domain within its space to a landing page. A very legitimate action."
The problem is with what happens after the redirect.
The server in Vancouver is looking at each query's original request text (for example "scotiabank.cm") and using it to choose which ads to return - either resellers or direct competitors of the Bank of Nova Scotia in this case.
A user looking for scotiabank.com visits scotiabank.cm and is redirected to some spamsite full of ads saying put your money in the bank of Hong Kong.
That's not the same as returning 404 or returning something entirely unrelated to the type of business in which the existing trademark applies.
The Canadian server knows that it has a request specifically looking for "scotiabank". It uses this keyword to sell a directly-competing bank's services. "Scotiabank" is a trademark in the Dominion of Canada, since the mid 1800's. The operators of this site, if they are in Vancouver, know this. The site is not keyword-neutral.
How is this different from a vendor setting up on a streetcorner and selling fake "Relox Watches" that look like Rolex? It's the misuse of the trademarked name for one product to sell a competing product; intent is to mislead.
Petition against .CM illegal forwarding