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Copyright protects original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. This definition is directly taken from the U.S. Copyright Act.
In its nature, the UDRP is quite a complicated document. It is commonly misinterpreted and it is usually unclear to the regular Internet user. That is why consulting an attorney familiar with the UDRP is practically a must whenever a trademark owner wants to file a UDRP complaint or whenever domain registrants face a UDRP complaint filed against them. Many people erroneously believe that they can handle such matters on their own, but please be advised that the UDRP, similar to most legal documents, can in many cases come out to be very tricky to the unqualified person.
Cybersquatting, according to the United States federal law known as the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price.
Copyright law protects “original works of authorship”. To produce something, it does not always take hard work only. You need to engage a certain portion of creativity as well. There is no need for the work to be the first of its kind, e.g. a novel simply needs to be the independent product of the author and not copied from some external source. Copyright does not protect against independent creation of similar or even identical works.
To begin with, the UDRP stands for Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. The UDRP is a mean through which trademark owners can seek protection of their rights in cases where they have been violated by someone who have registered a domain name identical or similar to the trademark. It is important to know that the UDRP is an administrative out-of-court dispute process.
