French wines victims of cybersquatting

Par Jean-François Poussard, le  19/09/2011

During the period of wine fairs, Keep Alert studied the domain names of French vineyards. Their identity on the Internet is battered with many cases of cybersquatting around the world.

Keep Alert selected the first wines of the official Bordeaux Wines classification of 1855 as Château Haut-Brion, Château Lafite-Rothschild, Château Latour, Château Margaux and Château Mouton Rothschild.

Keep Alert studied the names of these five vineyards among each Top Level Domains (TLDs) and detected the registered domain names identical, similar or confusingly similar to their trademarks. The research was extended to the domain names containing the words Haut Brion, Lafite, Latour, Margaux and Mouton for the best thoroughness.

The number of results was about one hundred for Haut Brion, five hundred for Margaux, one thousand for Mouton and several thousand for Latour.
Many domain names are registered by the trademarks owners. However, the vineyards do not have an efficient management of their own domain names. Their portfolio is a bunch of inactive domains, registrar waiting pages (eg latour.asia) or even parking pages (eg chateaumoutonrothschild.tv).

Infringements in every TLDs

The main infringements by third parties are parking pages with sponsored links. These pages (eg high-chateau-brion.info, chateaulafite.com ...) are common cases of cybersquatting.

The names of the vineyards are often associated with terms such as "buy" like buychateauhautbrion.com, buychateaumargaux.com or buylafiterothschild.com. The prefix "my" is also often used. A cybersquatter has even the audacity to register two prestigious domain names of the Rothschild universe mylafiterothschild.com and mymoutonrothschild.com.
 

These famous wines are victims of fraudulent deposits in many TLDs. The German .DE, 2nd world TLD is used for example with the fraudulent chateau-latour.de, haut-brion.de or chateau-mouton-rothschild.de.

Someone in Taiwan has built a “cellar” of domain names around the trademark Lafite as lafite.com.tw. A Russian uses margaux.ru for its website in Cyrillic including the name and the visual of the vineyard. Some online shops are of course selling unauthorized wines as lafite.cz or winehautbrion.com. A Chinese does not hesitate to use the domain name lafite.tel to propose users to contact him to buy wine.

Domain names are an area where the major vineyards still need to progress