An old adage states that the three most important considerations in real estate are location, location and location. The same is true for your company’s virtual real estate. If you customers want to find you, odds are they will look to the Internet — even if your company is a brick-and-mortar establishment.

When searching for your business online, many users will first try your company’s name followed by a top-level domain name, such as .com, .net, .biz or .org. That is wonderful if you own “yourcompany.com.” But what happens when your company does not own “yourcompany.com”? Sometimes you will need to simply educate your customer that you are at yourcompanyinc.com instead. Other times, you may need to take legal action.

The lack of a domain name’s availability can have a very legitimate justification. Delta Airlines, Delta Faucets and Delta Tools would all like to own Delta.com. Currently, it is owned by Delta Airlines, but it wasn’t always so. Before Delta Airlines, the name was registered to Delta Financial. Before that, an ISP named Delta owned it. Delta Airlines later bought it —  presumably for a large amount of money. Other reported sales of domain names include business.com ($7.5 million) and loans.com ($3 million). There are even online clearinghouses for those looking to buy domain names, such as alphanames.com.

While some companies have a legitimate interest in domain names – but are willing to sell if the price is right – there are also others who registered a large number of names hoping to sell them to companies who were late to the Internet party at a tidy profit. This is commonly referred to as cybersquatting.

Several procedures have been enacted to control the actions of cybersquatters. The AntiCybersquatting Consumer Protection Act defines cybersquatting as registering, trafficking or using a domain name with a bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. Under the Act, the cybersquatter may be required to pay the actual damages proved by the owner of the trademark or statutory damages up to $100,000 per mark.

Another approach to resolving cybersquatting is filing a complaint under the Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy (UDRP) created by Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). To prevail in a UDRP proceeding, a complainant must show:

1) The domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark under which the complainant has rights.

2) The domain name owner has no legitimate interests in respect to the domain name.

3) The domain name has been registered and used in bad faith.

According to statistics available from WIPO and NAF, more than 80 percent of UDRP proceedings are resolved in favor of the complainant. A large number go unopposed. However, the success rate has been so high that it has created a new strategy for the unscrupulous — “reverse domain hijacking” — where a party attempts to wrestle a domain name away from a legitimate user by weak claims of a trademark violation.

Whatever your domain needs may be, make sure you protect it early and document your legitimate interests in the name if you want to keep it.

Randall B. Bateman, founder of Bateman IP Law Group, specializes in the protection of Intellectual Property. He can be reached at rbb@utah-ip.com.