At TechCrunch we’ve been big fans of Dropbox for a long time now — the company launched at 2008’s TechCrunch50, we use the service to share images and documents on a daily basis, and we’re even impressed by the demo video they put together to help explain what the service does to newcomers. But there’s one thing we haven’t liked: Dropbox has been using the domain GetDropbox.com for years. Granted, it’s not a difficult URL to remember, but we’ve sometimes accidentally visited (and even occasionally linked) back to Dropbox.com. Now it looks like that is no longer an issue, as Dropbox has apparently acquired Dropbox.com. Right now the URL redirects to GetDropbox.com, but I’ll be surprised if the site isn’t ported over shortly.
It’s hard to gauge just how important a good domain name is to a startup’s success — after all, we’ve seen plenty of companies with meaningless names do very well for themselves. But there’s a difference between a name that’s gibberish and one that’s very easy to confuse with something else, which is a test that Dropbox failed with its GetDropbox domain. As the service has grown, so too has the amount of traffic heading to Dropbox.com, which has just featured a placeholder page full of ads. According to Compete, Dropbox.com had nearly 60,000 unique visitors last month. It’s impossible to know how many of them eventually made it to the correct domain, but there’s no doubt Dropbox has been losing out on plenty of traffic and customers. This is a big win for the startup.
Dropbox declined to comment on this story, but Justia has very recent records of a trademark dispute between Evenflow (Dropbox’s parent company) and Domains by Proxy, Inc., which was apparently operating the old domain. And it’s highly unlikely that the redirect is an accident. Update: You can see a copy of Dropbox’s complaint below. Domains By Proxy handed control over the domain back to the individual who was squatting it after Dropbox began to take legal action. The defendant had apparently begun to serve not just ads, but ads for Dropbox competitors on the page.
By the way, Dropbox kicks ass. This is the most useful thing on my computer besides Roboform.
Interesting. They knew they didn’t have a case if they went through arbitration to snag the domain name, so instead they went to court to attack them for infringing upon the trademark DropBox.
The guy should have just left a blank page up.
Internet Archive has screenshots of this domain going back years, and from what was on there, he only had GoDaddy’s parked domain page up….which in the past few years includes Google Adsense.
So…the ads displayed could have been via Adsense, in which case that blows for this guy because he didn’t reap any of that benefit if that is the case. This raises an question of whether DropBox should have gone after GoDaddy because the reality is that the damages they seemingly had occurred at the benefit of GoDaddy.
So the lesson here is don’t park your domain at GoDaddy which might display ads to competitors which also raises the question of whether Google has any liability for infringing on a trademark which I believe it has litigated before for this very reason (allowing others to buy adwords based on somebody elses trademark).
Dropbox rules my body. That is all.
I wonder how much the old dropbox.com earned :p
A good domain can make or break a startup. Would techcrunch be what it is if it was called fizzle. Remember mogulus?now livestream. Natural language domain name related to your content can be considered priceless considering the 10’s of million registered.
DropBox is the in veins of most of the ppl working on Internet….and this is a cheery at top
Any guesses on how much the domain purchase cost?
Your theory on the court case would appear to be correct. After reading your story here, we marked the case on Justia as featured, and put up the corresponding filings, and the case was definitely about the dropbox.com domain name:
http://docs.jus...03824/218466/8/
Great, thanks very much.
Why did they pick drop box from the get go if they didn’t have the domain name; I would have just picked something else for the name.
they probably got the trademark first, then laid in wait in order to make this happen. two demerits on domainsbyproxy for putting up a link farm that advertised dropbox competitors.
DomainsByProxy is just GoDaddy’s whois privacy service, so it most likely wasn’t them that parked it.
I guess if you can’t buy something you just build it on the domain and try to milk it out of the person by legal means. LAME
So, in layman’s terms, if I register a domain name that coincides with an existing trademark, I can’t use it for commercial purposes?
I guess that makes sense, but isn’t there at least a “Well, if you *really* wanted that name you should have registered it first” sort of finger-wagging that should happen too?
It depends on what you are using the domain for. Here is a domain trademark 101 scenario. Let’s say you own apple.net. Sure you can use that domain to sell apples but you would not be able to sell anything remotely related to computers or mp3 players or phones.
In order to to win a domain through the current dispute policy the trademark owner needs to prove three things
1) The domain was registered in bad faith. (ie tried to sell it back to the trademark owner)
2) The domain is confusingly similiar to the trademark. (ie registers wallmart.com typo of walmart.com)
3)The owner has no legitimate use for the name ( PPC ads aka parked page)
“Let’s say you own apple.net”
Or music….
(http://en.wikip..._Apple_Computer)
Depends on the usage as outlined above, if that guy had used dropbox for say a site about boxes getting dropped and damage he’d be in the clear, but as soon as he stepped into the same “arena” as dropbox he was being a bad person. It moves into squatting when you knowingly try and profit from typos from a trademark.
The biggest thing I got out of this was; who in their right mind would spend “in excess of 1 million dollars” marketing a product name which they did not own the domain for?
I can see both sides and I honestly think this guy shouldn’t be required to hand over the domain or be forced to sell it. I will admit that putting up links to competitors is extremely douchey, but I don’t believe that’s against the law.
But see, that’s exactly where he broke the law. Prior to DropBox’s success, the guy NEVER used the domain to advertise for file syncing services. It wasn’t until AFTER DropBox became a success that he started linking to competitors, thus cybersquatting. If the guy never did anything with the site, or he ran a website unrelated to DropBox, he would have been in the clear. Since he didn’t, he was using someone else’s trademark to his advantage–which is against the law.
Of course the domain name is important. Youtube was/is also losing traffic to Utube.com or “Universal Tube.” Utube was receiving so much unwanted traffic that its servers crashed and the company tried to sue Youtube. (They were not successful.) This is actually pretty funny because domainers would salivate for this type of “unwanted” traffic. All it took was someone to tell Universal Tube to redirect their servers to a parked page, and they are now laughing all the way to the bank. Utube.com probably makes more money that their primary tubing business haha.
By the way, domains by proxy is a privacy service, not the the company that owns the domain.
While I’m happy Dropbox finally got dropbox.com, I hope they didn’t get it free via UDRP or something. dropbox.com was registered in 1995, 9 years before Dropbox the company started with getdropbox.com, they can’t exactly complain they didn’t know that domain was already registered to someone else.
It looks like they went straight to federal court proceedings . . . bypassing the UDRP.
it was a must and they needed to get the domain. thanks for all the great stories!
Hmmm, this is interesting that it was due to legal action for dropbox.com …. That is kind of unsettling because a few years ago I bought the domain dropbx.com for an idea I had. Does that mean they plan on taking legal action against me as well for “copyright typo infringement”? Oy.
Sounds to me like if you don’t set up a page full of ads for their competetors, you’d be fine
Good for Dropbox. A+ Service, I never leave home without it.
will try out Dropbox today. hadnt all this time coz didnt think my narrowband connection would handle it, but let’s see. The video makes it sound like good old Gmail Drive.
Yay! The old domain was so clunky sounding!
I literally use this product every day. Glad to hear they were able to gain control of the domain.
Love the product. Use it every day. Glad they finally got the proper domain.
Dropbox got the domain. Squatter (must have) got the $$. Lawyers must have made money! Users have 3 less letters to type, so happy. Its a win-win-win-win situation.
I have been pretty impressed with dropbox…it is such a simple idea that I am surprised MSFT just did not include it with windows/skydrive…I think they might have had something for MSN users to save their office files in an online folder but it was not as easy to use as dropbox.
So have I got this right?
1) Dropbox create a business without owning the domain name Dropbox.com.
2) They are happy with using the domain name Getdropbox.com, fully aware that someone else owns Dropbox.com.
3) Any now they are big enough, Dropbox bully the owner of Dropbox.com into giving up his domain name.
How is this great? Why is everyone happy that this is the environment we want to create for Internet Entrepreneurs to operate in?
Surely the advice to Dropbox is to pick a business name that they have got the domain name for – not become a corporate bully and “steal” it from the rightful owner.
Shame on them!
No, you haven’t got it right. It’s not about Dropbox being big enough to bully the previous user. It’s about the previous user abusing Dropbox’s trademark. If the owner of dropbox.com hadn’t decided to profit from Dropbox’s trademark by selling ads for Dropbox’s competitors, Dropbox wouldn’t have had any justification for going after the domain.
Surely to infringe Dropbox’s trademark they would need to be “passing off” as Dropbox.
My understanding from this article is that Dropbox.com is selling adverts for a competitor service, which while a little bit cheeky, is surely not a breach of trademark.
So given no breach of trademark has occurred, how is this justified beyond the “I like Dropbox so it’s fine!” argument?
Yes, you’ve got it exactly right. Although I am a satisfied user of Dropbox’s service, I’m quite disgusted at the tactics they used to acquire this domain name.
Dropbox .. simply brilliant .. I use dropbox on regular basis .. it has really made sharing of the files and folders very easy …
Cheers,
Daina
One word for Dropbox – Brilliant .. I use it on regular basis … it has really made made file and folder sharing very easy …
Cheers,
Daina
Good domain name can be everything. Just look at Facebook.com.
You mean TheFacebook.com ? ;-P
My guess, they used the court system to get the domain owner’s attention, cause some financial pain, etc. Reminiscent of the gateway.com battle in the 90’s… http://cyber.la...in/gateway.html
Troy.
#
Well done dropbox – congratulations on your new domain!!!
Love your work and long time user here!
Love DropBox, love the nnet, love Techcrunch.
btw, domains by proxy is the privacy service opperated by Go Daddy.
Domains by Proxy IS Go Daddy. i worked there. in the DBP department.
btw, dropbox.com (like box.com) is blocked in china, getdropbox.com is accessible and really fast even. dekstop app is working nicely, too.
My account still has a few referrals left for the extra 256 bonus when you sign up:
https://www.get...ls/NTI0MTY5ODc5