One of my former law partners, Cyberspace Attorney Extraordinaire and the King of Business Development, Eric Sinrod, now of Duane Morris, reports that domain name disputes are being arbitrated in greater and greater numbers. 

As Eric reports in his weekly column for CNET, the National Arbitration Forum's domain name resolutions

climbed by a whopping 21 percent in 2006 from the prior year. Indeed, the NAF handled 1,658 Internet trademark disputes in 2006, the largest filing year in the history of the NAF domain name dispute program.

Since the inception of the program, the NAF has presided over more than 7,600 Internet domain name disputes. A number of famous trademarks have been at stake in the proceedings, such as trademarks relating to the New York Yankees, George Foreman, Vin Diesel and Louis Vuitton.

What's the upshot? Trademark holders are more than willing to go after and seek the transfer of domain names that incorporate their marks. Meanwhile, domain name registrants at times are digging in their heels and are trying to keep the domain names they have registered. There seems to be no let-up in this fertile dispute area. In fact, there appears to be a real uptick in such cases.

One such case surrounded the use of "Mr. Charbucks" in the sale of a rival coffee brand to Starbucks.

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