DomainTools Blog

Former Wall Street Journal reporter David Kesmodel has uncovered about 30 domains in the Internet REIT portfolio that are misspellings on Google and Google products. A majority of the domains are based on the Google Earth product. Internet REIT is venture backed by Maveron LLC, which was co-founded by Howard Schultz - the chairman of Starbucks. When asked for comment, iREIT’s CEO, Bob Martin, and COO, Craig Snyder, told Mr. Kesmodel in an interview, “the company has been taking steps to remove “legally sensitive” domains from its portfolio, having acquired many through acquisitions of smaller domain investors’ portfolios. The company is in the process of implementing a system to identify and remove such names from its portfolio of about 400,000 monikers.”

Internet REIT is generally considered to be one of the White Hats in the domain industry so this discovery is very out of character for them. Since being notified of the trademarks, IREIT has stopped monetizing the domains and the domains no longer resolve. Having these types of domains in a portfolio can be a scary legal situation for any big portfolio, the standard fine is $1000 per name under the Anti-Cybersquatting law. Any company can make easy money by owning famous typos but they face many large risks that generally out weight the gains. Considering that IREIT most likely will not renew these domains, it is safe to say that someone else will picking them up. Trademark domains have a bad cycle of abuse - if a camper gets wise they delete the domain and the cycle starts all over again. Small portfolio owners take more chances and generally don’t know the legal risks involved when camping on trademarks.

Mr. Kesmodel also uncovered may other famous trademark names in the iREIT portfolio in a later post that day.