Vic: Fashion designer Bettina Liano wins over cybersquatter

AAP General News (Australia)
12-04-2000
Vic: Fashion designer Bettina Liano wins over cybersquatter

MELBOURNE, Dec 4 AAP - Melbourne fashion designer Bettina Liano has won back the right
to name a website after her clothing label from a "cybersquatter" who had already registered
the name.

Liano established her reputation in the world of fashion with her upmarket women's
designs but was stymied when she sought to establish her presence in virtual reality.

The designer discovered in April that a Footscray man had already registered the domain
name "bettinaliano.com" in the United States.

In earlier cases businesses faced a potentially costly and lengthy court battle to
evict the cybersquatter, or may have been forced simply to buy off the squatter.

Fortunately the peak body of Internet domain registers, Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers (ICANN), set up a new policy this year for resolving domain name disputes,
according to Ms Liano's lawyer Sebastian Hughes.

ICANN now refers such disputes to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)
based in Geneva.

"It is a lot more streamlined and it has been designed to avoid litigation and it has
been designed to be applicable cross-border," Mr Hughes said.

The WIPO finalised its decision to "evict" the cybersquatter last week after it ruled
that the man had not registered the name in good faith.

Bettina Liano's case was even quicker because the cybersquatter failed to put forward
his case and never replied to the fashion designer's attempts to communicate.

"Our client was suspecting that this person might be requesting money at some stage
but they elected not to respond to our letters of demand," Mr Hughes said.

Mr Hughes said the WIPO win was one of the first for an Australian business and sent
a message for other high-profile Australians seeking to protect their names.

"It's a very cheap mechanism and it's certainly a lot cheaper than a lot of the asking
prices for these domain names that the cybersquatters are asking for."

AAP nl/clr/cjh/

KEYWORD: BETTINA LIANO

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