9 years later, Twitter gets Twitter.com.au 2015-11-18

Twitter has won a cybersquatting complaint against the owner of the Australian domain name Twitter.com.au. The company filed the complaint with World Intellectual Property Organization. Jason Boyce registered the domain name in 2006, just as the Twitter service was in development. Twitter hadn’t bothered him about the domain name (at least formally) until 2012, when it objected to Boyce’s trademark filing for Twitter.com.au. Now, in 2015, it decided to file a cybersquatting complaint under the .au Dispute Resolution Policy. After using the domain name for many years, Boyce got creative. He started offering email addresses and said his company name was “Tyas Wittermann Creative”, and Twitter is short for that. Boyce had asked for AUS $500,000 for the domain name. Under the .au Dispute Resolution Policy, complainants just have to show that a domain name was used in bad faith, not that it was registered in bad faith (as is necessary with .com disputes). The panel determined that it was, indeed, used in bad faith.

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