If, like me, you often type too quickly, or don’t bother to check you’ve got the right web address to start with, you can make all sorts of unexpected discoveries online. For example, type www.bhf.org, rather than bhf.org.uk when looking for the British Heart Foundation, and you’ll find the following text: “By clicking to enter … you will be directed to sex, porn, and sexually oriented material.” Blimey.

On the other hand, if you’d mis-typed, you could have found www.bfh.org, a rather charming site dedicated to Mexican folk dancing. Now, I’m sure the British Heart Foundation doesn’t really mind if people looking for its site are distracted briefly by Mexican dancers, but the porn is a different matter.

The National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) has faced similar problems in the past. In 2001 the organisation, which used the ndcs.org.uk domain for its website, discovered that an individual based in the US had purchased the www.ndcs.org domain, where he ran a delightful website called Nude Dames, Chat, Sex.

The site owner, Harold A Meyer, had also registered a number of other .org domain names, including bhf.org, and had already been the subject of a complaint from the British Heart Foundation to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), which arbitrates in such cybersquatting disputes.

Meyer had asked the BHF for £20,000 to relinquish his rights to the bhf.org domain, and was later to demand £12,500 from the NDCS. Both charities felt they had no choice but to take legal action.

Meyer won his case against the BHF on the grounds that the charity’s initials were not sufficiently recognisable by the British public, but lost to the NDCS. He then launched a legal action of his own in the US, claiming the charity had stolen his domain. “These charities are terrible – they act like the world owes them,” Meyer told the BBC in July 2002. Luckily, the courts did not share this opinion.

Elsewhere, Youth Net UK spent four years in dispute with a Saudi Arabian businessman whose do-it.org site, which displayed photographs of potential brides for arranged marriages, was a bit too similar to Youth Net’s do-it.org.uk volunteer network site. Youth Net eventually paid just over £1,100 for the domain.

Another problem some charities have faced in the past is registration for their domain name lapsing and being purchased by someone else. The problem can be exacerbated because many organisations don’t have direct responsibility for registering their domain in the first place. Rather, this service is provided by their ISP, and the registration authority may then remind the ISP about the renewal date, but not the charity.

You might not think there’s much chance anyone else would be interested in your domain name but, in fact, over the last decade a whole industry has developed around the practice of buying and reselling domains. Also, the buying is frequently managed at very low cost by automated software, and the buyer’s identity hidden behind online privacy protection services. According to WIPO, the number of cybersquatting disputes on which it was required to adjudicate in 2006 was up 25 per cent on the previous year.

In 2002, The Poetry Society failed to renew registration of its poetrysoc.com domain, and the domain was purchased by a Hong Kong-based search directory company. The charity was forced to buy and register a new domain, and print more than 30,000 leaflets at short notice to promote the new site. Fortunately for the Society, the lawyer it hired was able to resolve the issue in their favour within ten days, with the Society paying a small fee to recover the domain.

Because the case was resolved so quickly it was able to save the money that might have been needed for a more comprehensive reprinting of publicity and stationery materials, and in fact eventually chose to use its new domain name (www.poetrysociety.org.uk), although typing in the old name will still take you to the Society’s home page.

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Jules Mann, now director at the Poetry Society, was its web manager and strategic development manager in 2002. She says that at the time she was very keen to spread the word about what had happened, to try and help other organisations avoid the same problem.

For a start, she recognised that the Society was fortunate just to have a web manager. “I think that’s still a bit of a luxury for a charity,” she says. “Most still don’t have a full-time web manager, unless they’re quite big organisations and I think it’s one of those things that can easily fall through the cracks. You need somebody to be on top of making sure the registration stays up to date.”

If a charity fails to spend the small amount of money required to renew the domain (it can be as little as £20 per year), it may face a big bill for legal costs, or just for taking a case through WIPO’s adjudication process. And even though charities will often be able to win a legal dispute against someone like Meyer, even a ruling in your favour from WIPO will not necessarily mean the cybersquatter gives in, particularly if the site is based outside the UK. Nor does a WIPO ruling in your favour entitle you to financial compensation.

Registering domain names similar to the one the charity wants to use for its websites is the safest way of avoiding this problem. What might prove a problem for smaller organisations is that there could be quite a few domains they need to register, along with .org, org.uk, .com, and .co.uk; including .net, .biz, and .tv, while the new .mobi domain, which is intended to be used for websites and internet services designed to be accessed via mobile phones, may become more important in future.

Within each of these domain name types there might be dozens of variations, involving different spellings, or the use of hyphens and underscores. This means that keeping up to date with all the possible combinations can become an expensive and time-consuming task.

Jason Potts, director at THINK Consulting Solutions, believes this problem can only get worse as more domain names become available for sale. He points out, though, that new domains continue to be released, and the different, creative ways you can build up a domain name by playing around with spellings should actually be good news for charities looking for new ways of attracting visitors to websites or micro sites dedicated to particular campaigns or projects.

Now, you may be wondering if this isn’t all a bit of a fuss about nothing. Surely if someone types in the wrong domain name and finds a website filled with unspeakable filth, then they will realise their mistake pretty quickly and head for Google to find the right site. But not everyone is that web-savvy, and even if they were, says Lawrence Simanowitz, partner in the charity and social enterprise department at Bates Wells & Braithwaite, that’s still not really the point. “Even if people figure it out fairly quickly, it’s just not great PR, is it,” he says. “I know that these are not the most earth-shattering problems that a charity can encounter, but given that they are fairly easy to resolve you’d think that the thing to do is for charities to take the necessary preventative steps.”

They might also include copyrighting some key words connected to the organisation. But if those steps fail, what can you do? If it is possible to find out who a new site’s owners are, or who is cybersquatting on your domain, then you should start by contacting them and explaining the situation, suggests Simanowitz.

“If you do have a contact address then you can at least write to them directly, and explain that you’re a charity, and this is damaging you,” he says. “Sometimes, even if they might be pretty aggressive commercial operators they might be prepared to be generous to a charity. And you can do that without involving the lawyers. Beyond that, if people have taken the name in bad faith, then you’ve got to get the lawyers involved, and you can get an injunction against them in the meantime, which costs more money. The only other thing you can do is be prepared to pay them a lot of money to get it back quickly.”

Some websites worth visiting

• Nominet, the internet registry for .uk domain names: www.nominet.org.uk
  
  
• www.namedroppers.com offers a service that lists all the web domains currently registered that could be close to the domain your organisation uses or might want to use in future. This should help you decide which domain names it is worth purchasing. You can also sign up for a Domain Watch service that will alert you if that situation changes, or someone registers a domain that might infringe on your copyright
  
  
• You’ll find lots of useful information on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) website, www.wipo.int and on the website of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body responsible for the global coordination of domain names, www.icann.org

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