A lot of people have had UDRPs filed against them or been sued for registering a domain based on a celebrity's name. However, under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), a person doesn't have to be a celebrity for you to get in trouble if you register their name as a domain, then try to sell it to them for a profit. Last Janauary attorney David Lin of Brooklyn based Lewis & Lin won an ACPA judgment for a New York real estate investor named Paul Bogoni against a woman named Vicdania Gomez who registered PaulBogoni.com and PaulBogoni.org then demanded Bogoni pay her $1 million each for the domain names.  

The New York Times reported that the Federal District Court for the Southern District in Manhattan ruled that Ms. Gomez, who apparently has a prior social relationship with 

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Mr. Bogoni, had committed cyber-extortion in accordance with the ACPA, a federal law intended to protect individuals from online registrations of personal names and trademarks made in bad faith. After winning the suit, Lin told the the Times, "This case shows that people have ownership in their own names, and they can’t be used to ransom back to them for extortionate purposes or for blackmail."

Now, you might have thought would have been the end of it, but Lin and Mr. Bogoni thought this  squatting incident was so egregious they might by able to get the court to do something it seldom does, order the defendant to pay Bogoni's legal fees too. Last week, after waiting 10 

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months for a decision, Lin and Bogoni got some more good news - the judge agreed with them, ruling that Ms. Gomez is now on the hook for Bogoni's legal fees as well as her own. That is no small matter - Lin said his fees exceeded $70,000. The judgment requires Lin to provide detailed information on the work he did on the case before the court will set the exact amount Ms. Gomez will have to come up with, but it's not going to be pocket change.

A couple of points to take away from this are 1) registering someone's name as a domain and then trying to sell it to them at a profit is the kind of "bad faith" that can wind up teaching you a very expensive lesson (and it doesn't have to be a trademarked or company name to put a big dent in your 

bank account) and 2) if someone tries this with your own name, Mr. Lin's track record indicates he might be a good guy to put on the case (both David and his partner Brett Lewis are well known in the domain industry).