After a year plus of allowing the listing of blatant trademark violations at its marketplace, Flippa.com – the Australian auction house for domains and web sites – finally decided to utilize a filtering mechanism.
The method of disallowing certain strings in domains was welcomed by DomainGang.
So exactly how is it implemented these days?
We searched for the following strings in Flippa auctions, landing 10 results that were obvious trademark violations, containing one or more of the following:
- iphone
- ipad
- apple
The 10 auctions that were reported have yet to be tackled by Flippa, who returned our email on two references for “Pinterest” with the statement:
“The trademarked term ” pinterest ” is not currently on our list of blocked domain names, at this time.”
It appears that Flippa does not add any blocked trademarks until the trademark holders themselves complain.
As explained by Andrew Knibbe of Flippa, that was the reason that Flippa began to block trademark terms in the first place.
So are we back to square one?
