Today Box.com announced on their blog a new major release product called Box Accelerator.
As we often point out, the company made the announcement without securing the matching domain name and someone in China registered the domain today and the domain is already parked.
There are several news stories out today on the product already including Slashgear.com, Zdnet.com, FastCompany, and TechCrunch
Here is the domain name registration info:
Domain Name: boxaccelerator.com
Created On: 2012-09-17
Expiration Date: 2013-09-17
Name Server: NS1.BODIS.COM
Name Server: NS2.BODIS.COM
Registrant Name: lei chen
Registrant Organization: zge
Registrant Street1: kefaroad
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City: shenzhen
Registrant State/Province: guangdong
Registrant Postal Code: 518057
Registrant Country: CN
Box Accelerator does have a ™ symbol by the term on Box.com, so the product was was important enough to the company for it to spend thousands of dollars applying for a trademark, but not important enough to spend the $50 to register the domain.
Here is how the company describes the product:
“Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Box Accelerator™, an enterprise-grade global data transfer network that gives our business and enterprise customers up to a 10X boost in upload speeds. A combination of new infrastructure in nine locations throughout the world and innovative network intelligence software, Box Accelerator delivers performance enhancements and a better user experience – with all the trusted security and reliability you love about Box…And you don’t need to take our word for it – neutral, third party testing provider Neustar found that Box had the lowest average upload time across all locations tested, and was 2.7 times faster than the closest competitor globally. ”
@MHB
“but not important enough to spend the $50 to register the domain”
$50? They could have secured for a small fraction of that, which makes the story even more absurd.
Joe
Generally big companies use a brand protection type of company like MarkMonitor.com to register their domains, they charge well above Godaddy.com rates
So does this make the registrant a Cybersquatter or just an informed businessman?
That is for a court or UDRP panel to decide.
What I think is even more absurd is the fact that the moron from China is TM-squatting. Some people really don’t get it.
From the looks of it, they applied for the trademark since mid August. this should be an interesting UDRP if there is one.
@Mr. T,
Not necessarily true. As long as the new OWNER of boxaccelerator.com starts a business that in no way infringes upon the existing trademark, he will likely be ok.
Berryhill – want to back me up on this one?
@VegasPirate44 – true, I haven’t checked the classes for the TM, but I doubt they filed a TM in all 46 classes. However, Box.com can always play the “bad faith” card. Try to convince a jury that the domain was picked up by chance and the registrant didn’t know about the “Box Accelerator” announcement.
It doesn’t happen by chance that someone from China (where TM-squatting is a quite common problem) picks up a domain days after Box.com launches a new “product”.
Box.com on the other hand should’ve picked up the domain before they released a press release to save them from this kind of problem.