How to win against a cybersquatter

have grounds for a case, where to go from here?

[DXL]

I represent a particular music group that has been around for about a decade (and have had their name trademarked as long). For whatever reason, they have only recently chosen to have a website created. nameofgroup.com is already registered, I checked the whois and its some offshore business in the Caymans. What caught my attention is that the same company is also the registered owner of another .com for another group I started doing online promotion for (I discovered this almost a year ago).

As you can guess, you visit either URL and you get the generic advertising screen and millions of popups. These guys are cybersquatting, I tried emailing them a year ago and they wanted $5,000 for one of the domains in question.

So, my group has their name trademarked, what is the absolute best (and least costly) means of legally making these guys sign the domain over to us? I'd like to avoid going through court, but it seems like we would have the grounds to do that if it came to it. What do you guys suggest? (and if you know a decent lawyer for this kind of thing just stickymail it to me)

[bcc1234]

IANAL, but I would say I'll cost you more than $5k in your time (I'm sure you don't work for free) and legal fees to sue them.

You can try to scare them with some pseudo-legal letters and they might drop the price, but I don't think you'll get it for the nominal price.

[Shak]

a chat with a good domain lawyer would shed some light on this situation.

at least you would be told what routes are available, and what the total cost may be.

Shak

[Lisa]

Sounds like you have a good case, does the person own any other domains like that? The more you can prove the better. BTW, I just sent you the name of a good domain lawyer. UDRP is the uniform process that is designed for fighting a domain disputes cheap and out of court. Whenever you register a domain name you actual agree in the fine print to use UDRP. So this person you are fighting has already agreed to proceed with a UDRP.

[onebaldguy]

I am just beginning to go after a company that has performed cybersquatting. I think specific one is referred to as a spelling cybersquatter as they have just removed the "s" from the end of our name. So I am pursuing this via the UDRP, but I want to show that they have no affiliation to this name and are just redirecting to their page. It takes them to their page (which is in direct competition of ours) and has their name on it. I want to prove that this is happening, but I believe it is a 301 redirect.

Is there anyway to prove that this is occurring (I want to prove it to the UDRP - I am afraid they will remove the redirect and make a fake page trying to show why they should own the URL, once they find out we are pursuing this.)

[BjarneDM]

onebaldguy:
for mozilla you can get an extension/tool that records the complete header communication between mozilla and the server.

further information here:
[livehttpheaders.mozdev.org...]

[Dorian]

Which is your domain and which is theirs?