Flippa.com - The domain and web site aftermarket from Down Under
DomainGang is finally vindicated.
For a year now we’ve been saying how Flippa.com – the Australian marketplace for auctioning domains and web sites – allowed particularly famous trademark violations to be listed.
The examples we raised our concern about included Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft.
According to the latest corporate blog post by Flippa, first reported yesterday by the Hybrid Domainer, Flippa is putting in place a mechanism that blocks famous trademarks.
The announcement playfully states how a domain such as FacebookTwitterGoogle.com would be impossible to list at Flippa from now on:
“As always, we don’t attempt to police potential trademark breaches on behalf of trademark holders but actively work with them when they bring breaches to our attention. As a result of recently working with a number of these trademark owners, we have developed measures that will now block some specific trademarked URLs from being sold on Flippa. This list currently includes some frequently-used trademarked names such as Twitter, Google and Facebook and will grow over time upon request by trademark holders.“
Essentially, what is being said here is that Flippa will filter a few famous trademarks, thus lessening the potential headaches arising from litigation by the trademark holders. This is definitely a step in the right direction.
In a comment, Andrew Knibbe of Flippa insinuated that they indeed received notification by a famous trademark holder, potentially Facebook.
We aren’t sure when this measure will take effect, as we did try to list FacebookTwitterGoogle.com and nothing blocked us from starting the process. 😀
Flippa won’t disclose the full list of “banned keywords” that would prohibit someone from listing a particular domain, but it’s certain that Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Twitter are included in the list.
