Someone else registered the domain matching your business name

Two businesses find the same thing on the same morning. One has traded under its name for eleven years and holds a federal registration; its .com is parked behind a "make an offer" page. The other incorporated six weeks ago; its .com was registered in 2009 by a photographer who has used it ever since. Only one of them has a case, and not because it wants the name more.

Your business name gives you no claim on the domain — a trademark might

A registrant holds a registration agreement with an ICANN-accredited registrar, which delegates the name in the DNS. Whether that bundle is *property* has been unsettled in US law for twenty years: the Ninth Circuit held in Kremen v. Cohen (2003) that a domain name is intangible property capable of being converted, while the Supreme Court of Virginia had held three years earlier in Network Solutions v. Umbro International that a registration is "the product of a contract for services" and so cannot be garnished by a judgment creditor. Neither line says the owner of a business name is entitled to the matching domain. The name went to whoever asked first, and that is the whole story until a trademark enters it.

What creates leverage is a mark. A registered one is the clean case. Unregistered rights can work too — WIPO's Overview of panel views records that paragraph 4(a)(i) "encompasses both registered and unregistered (sometimes referred to as common law) marks" — but you must show the mark "has become a distinctive identifier which consumers associate with the complainant's goods and/or services", proved by duration of use, sales, advertising, public recognition or surveys. The Overview is blunt that "conclusory allegations of unregistered or common law rights ... would not normally suffice", and descriptive terms carry a greater onus still. A clearance search run before the name is chosen surfaces the problem while it is still cheap.

Buying it is usually the right answer, and saying so is not a defeat

Treating a four-figure ask as capitulation is how people spend USD 6,000 to avoid spending USD 3,000. Three mechanics are worth knowing. Enquire through a broker rather than from a company address; an approach from the trademark owner is the fastest way to double an asking price. Settle through a domain escrow service, which holds the funds and releases them on confirmed transfer. And sequence the paperwork: ICANN's Transfer Policy lets a registrar impose a 60-day lock on moving a name between registrars after a change of registrant, so ask for the inter-registrar transfer first and the ownership change second.

The UDRP asks three questions and you have to win all three

Paragraph 4(a) of the Policy sets out what a complainant must prove, and its closing line leaves no room: "the complainant must prove that each of these three elements are present."

• (i) your domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights;
• (ii) you have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and
• (iii) your domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith.

Paragraph 4(b) lists four non-exclusive circumstances evidencing bad faith: acquiring the name primarily to sell it to the mark owner or a competitor for more than documented out-of-pocket costs; registering it to block the mark owner, where there is a pattern of that conduct; registering it primarily to disrupt a competitor's business; and using it to attract internet users for commercial gain by creating a likelihood of confusion with the mark. Paragraph 4(c) gives the registrant the mirror image: a bona fide offering of goods or services before notice of the dispute, being commonly known by the name even without any mark, or legitimate noncommercial or fair use without intent to misleadingly divert or tarnish.

The conjunction in element (iii) quietly ends most complaints. Registered and used in bad faith. Nobody can target a mark that did not yet exist, so WIPO records the settled position: "where a respondent registers a domain name before the complainant's trademark rights accrue, panels will not normally find bad faith on the part of the respondent." The narrow exception is a registration aimed at *nascent* rights — on insider knowledge before a merger announcement, or straight after your trademark application was filed.

What a decision gives you, and the two clocks around it

Five providers are approved to administer the UDRP: WIPO, FORUM, the Czech Arbitration Court, the Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre and the Canadian International Internet Dispute Resolution Centre. You pick one and pay its fee; the respondent can force a three-member panel, and the fees are then split. There is no discovery and one round of pleadings.

That last pause is the mechanism people miss. Paragraph 4(k) preserves court proceedings entirely. If the losing registrant sues in a Mutual Jurisdiction — the registrar's principal office, or the registrant's own address in the registration record — and gets file-stamped documentation to the registrar inside the window, the transfer waits for a settlement, a dismissal or a court order. A UDRP win is an administrative outcome a court can override, not a judgment.

The ACPA is where the money is

In the United States, 15 U.S.C. § 1125(d) makes a person liable to the owner of a mark where they have "a bad faith intent to profit from that mark" and register, traffic in, or use a domain name identical or confusingly similar to it, whether or not the goods or services compete. Nine non-exclusive factors guide the enquiry, and they read as a list of what a squatter typically lacks: IP rights of their own in the name, a connection to their legal name, prior bona fide use, noncommercial or fair use. Weighed against those are an intent to divert consumers in a way that harms goodwill, an offer to transfer without ever having used it, false contact details, a habit of registering others' marks, and how distinctive or famous the mark is.

Two provisions do the practical work. Section 1117(d) lets a plaintiff elect statutory damages "in the amount of not less than $1,000 and not more than $100,000 per domain name, as the court considers just", which is what makes a claim viable when actual damages are unprovable. And § 1125(d)(2) allows an in rem action against the domain name itself, filed where the registrar or registry sits, where the owner cannot obtain personal jurisdiction over the registrant or locate them through diligent effort. The remedies there are limited to forfeiture, cancellation or transfer.

The statute carries its own brake. Under § 1125(d)(1)(B)(ii), bad-faith intent "shall not be found in any case in which the court determines that the person believed and had reasonable grounds to believe that the use of the domain name was a fair use or otherwise lawful".

Where there is simply no route

Genuine criticism. A genuinely noncommercial complaint site sits inside paragraph 4(c)(iii). The line panels draw is about the string, not the sentiment: WIPO records that "even a general right to legitimate criticism does not necessarily extend to registering or using a domain name identical to a trademark", because an exact match impersonates you. Where the name is the mark plus a derogatory term, panels tend to find a legitimate interest if the use is genuinely fair and not misleading.

Their own name, or a common word. Paragraph 4(c)(ii) protects a registrant "commonly known by the domain name, even if you have acquired no trademark or service mark rights", so a Mr Delaney holding delaney.com is not a squatter. Nor is someone running an unrelated business on a dictionary word since 2004, which paragraph 4(c)(i) covers as a bona fide offering predating notice of the dispute. The URS says the quiet part out loud: "Trading in domain names for profit, and holding a large portfolio of domain names, are of themselves not indicia of bad faith."

Redacted records do not stop you, but they change the order

Since 28 January 2025, RDAP has replaced WHOIS as the definitive source for gTLD registration data, and ICANN's Registration Data Policy governs what appears in it. Where redaction is required by applicable law, the registrant's name, street, postal code and phone are withheld, and the registrar must instead publish an email address or web form that reaches them anonymously. What stays public is the registrant country, the registrar, the creation date, the domain statuses and the abuse contact — and the creation date alone answers the question element (iii) turns on.

For the rest, the Policy gives you a disclosure request. Registrars and registries must publish their request process, acknowledge a properly formed request within two business days, and respond within thirty calendar days absent exceptional circumstances, with the data or with reasons. Your request must identify you, list the data sought, set out your legal rights and the basis for asking, and affirm good faith.

The faster path is often to skip identification entirely. File a UDRP naming the privacy service or the redacted registrant; the provider's verification request obliges the registrar to return the underlying data within two business days, which WIPO then passes to the complainant with an invitation to amend. Panels treat a proxy used merely to avoid notice, or one known to block disclosure, as supporting an inference of bad faith. Identification comes first only if your plan starts with a letter — and a cease and desist needs a name on the envelope.

What the answer actually turns on

One comparison decides nearly all of this: the date your rights in the name began, against the date the domain was registered or last changed hands. If your rights came first and the holder is trading on them or trying to sell them back, you have a UDRP and possibly an ACPA claim. If the domain came first, no amount of unfairness converts that into a route, and the choice is a cheque or a different name.

The version of this problem that never happens costs nothing. Names get chosen before they get checked. The half hour spent running the mark and the matching domains together — before the logo, the signage and the eleven years of goodwill — is the only point in the sequence where you have complete control, and the one place where registering the mark early does more work than any proceeding can afterwards.