Domain squatters, that sounds gross

AtomBomb

So I was looking at setting up a forum for a project where I work, and I got to looking at what domains were available. We already own tucsonymca.org, but I found that tucsonymca.com is taken by someone else. They appear to be using it as a farm to make money off of Google ads (it looks like Google anyway) and annoying seizure popups. What is involved in taking possession of something like that? I vaguely remember hearing that it was now possible, but I don't know how to do it, or how much of a pain in the ass it would be. I don't know if it's something we would even want to pursue, but if we could spend a small amount for the registration to keep people from going to this site by accident I think it would be worthwhile. Anyone have experience with a similar situation?

Nana

We had a similar experience when trying to get a website up and running for the family business. We had been around for a while (6 years or so) and a lot of stores offered our merchandise, but because we only sold to distributor's only we didn't think a website was very important.

Anyways, about a year ago we decided to set up a website and tried to buy our company name as a domain, same thing happened to us, turns out someone already bought it and it was just a page full of adds. Because we owned our business name, we did a search to find out if the name was bought in the US (because then we could take it) but who ever bought it was in Jamaica. (which they told us was common for domain squatters)
We contacted the people in Jamaica and they told us they would sell us the domain name for $25,000 we laughed at their offer and bought a .net page instead.

A few weeks ago I found out that they weren't paying for our .com page anymore and we are now in the process of buying that up.

So basically in my experience there isn't much you can do, I would suggest just keeping an eye on the status of your .com domain in hopes that you're able to buy it.

DrFrylock

The official policy from the IANA is here.

Unless you hold a (registered) trademark on that name, you really have no more legal right to the name than they do.

Mostly these guys are looking for a payoff. You can contact them and some will be reasonable, and some won't. Remember that they're paying maybe $35 a year for this domain and hoping to make that back through advertising, or cash in big by selling the domain.

If you contact them, you can see how much they're selling it for. They may quote, as above, some ridiculous number like $25,000. At this point, laugh at them and tell them you'll give them $500. Since that's still a somewhat tidy profit for it, they may be willing to negotiate. The downside is that if you don't reach consensus, you've tipped them off that you're interested, and they have nothing to lose by jerking you around. Depending on how profitable the name is for them, they may just let it lapse; find out who their registrar is and when the domain expires and jump on it if they don't renew.

If you really badly want to push the issue, you first have to register a trademark, file suit, and then begin the long arduous process of kicking them off the site. It's really a lot like evicting a deadbeat tenant and it can take months or years and certainly thousands of dollars paid to trademark attorneys.

Blake T

While I haven't personally done this I'd recomend before you negotiate with them, buy up the .net domain, then when it comes to negotiating and offering $500 to them point out to them that you already own the .net domain but would prefer the .com but it doesn't matter too much because you have the .net domain.

Buy the .net domain first though because if you don't and you say you are just going to buy the .net domain they may beat you to the punch.