IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS & TUTORIALS, VOL. 14, NO. 1, FIRST QUARTER 2012 193 Cybersquatting at the Intersection of Internet Domain Names and Trademark Law Steven Wright, Senior Member, IEEE Abstract—This is a tutorial about the basic elements of domain name system and trademark law focussing on the interactions between them and specifically on the concept of cybersquatting. Cybersquatting is the registration (with the intent to profit) of a domain name that is the trademark of another. The tutorial reviews the structure of the domain name space and it’s associated protocols as well as the legal context for trademarks and the recent advances for adjudication of disputes related to cybersquatting. Intermixed with the technical discussion, the paper also provides four rationales for engineers concerned with the design of communications protocols and related information systems to give consideration to aspects of law, in this case trademark law, that may impact the design or usage of these protocols and information systems. Some potential impacts of recent extensions proposed for the gTLD domain name space are also considered. Index Terms—gTLD, TM, DNS, cybersquatting, domain name system, trademarks. I. I NTRODUCTION T HE INTERNET started with a non-proprietary protocol for interconnecting U.S. Department of Defense com- puter systems in the 1970’s, but the services riding over this protocol have since burgeoned from email to include voice and video communications, and machine to machine commu- nications such as distributed computing (e.g. grid computing) and sensor networks. Through the 1980’s, the Internet was primarily academic, but increasing commercialization in the 1990’s accelerated with the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1994 (See, e.g., [1] for a broader discussion of the evolution of the Internet). It is the commercialization of the Internet that sets the stage for the interaction between commercial/legal concepts like trademarks and the protocol mechanisms and practices of the Internet. The domain name system was an early innovation of the Internet to provide a dynamic linkage between a structured and human readable name space and the somewhat cryptic internet protocol addresses. Since that initial innovation, the structure of the name space has evolved, additional IP address formats are being defined (IPv6 now deployed as well as IPv4), and the procedures and policies related to the administration of names and address have also evolved. Trademark law has also evolved to specifically recognize cybersquatting claims (i.e. claims of registration of a domain name with intent to profit where the domain name is the trademark of another) and enable some novel mechanisms to resolve those claims. Manuscript received 1 March 2010; revised 6 July 2010 and 12 July 2010. S. Wright is with the College of Law, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, 30332 USA (e-mail: s.wright@ieee.org). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/SURV.2011.090710.00029 This paper provides a tutorial regarding the evolving inter- action between Internet domain names and trademark law, and specifically, the notion of cybersquatting. Section II provides an introduction to the protocols of the domain name system. Trademark law is reviewed in section III. Section IV considers Cybersquatting in more detail. The challenges presented by the evolution of the domain name space and its associated administrative procedures are considered in section V. With incremental evolutionary steps happening via several different bodies operating at different timescales, it is some- time difficult to see the larger context. Specific RFCs provide details of the minutia of the relevant protocols and voluminous legal treatise’s (See, e.g., [2], [3]) can provide similar precision in legal details. Communications technologies like the DNS do not exist in a vacuum, rather they are deployed and scaled to serve societal needs. Altruistic engineering objectives of service to societal needs include not merely the development of protocols and systems to support articulated societal objec- tives, but also the analysis that permits the refinement of those policy objectives (as stated in laws) through the demonstration of the existence of alternative frames of reference. From a more selfish perspective, a knowledge and sensitivity of the general contours of the law helps engineers to avoid liability (e.g. from aiding and abetting illegal activities) and design better protocols and systems by including those legal constraints in the design process. In providing this tutorial, my hope is that it provides an accessible contextual basis for communication protocol and information system designers to understand the continued evolution of the technology and the law in this area. II. DOMAIN NAMES The Internet routes packets based on an address field in the packet header. IP addresses are traditionally 32 bits in IPv4, but recently 128 bit addresses are increasingly being used for IPv6. IPv4 addresses are typically printed using a dot notation to separate each octet (e.g., 192.168.1.1 is an IPv4 address from the private unicast address space). IPv6 addresses are normally written as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits (e.g., fd1f:a624:e7cf:eced:ac01:bd02:ce03:df04 is an IPv6 unique local unicast address). IP addresses proved somewhat cumbersome to use and administer directly and names are much more human friendly. Computer systems developed a file, hosts.txt, to pro- vide a simple mapping between names of computers (the hosts) and the IP network addresses where they could be reached [4]. The Domain Name System [5] [6] was developed 1553-877X/12/$25.00 c  2012 IEEE