ACPA
A US law letting trademark owners sue cybersquatters in federal court, an alternative to the UDRP.
- glossary
The ACPA (Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act), enacted in 1999 as part of the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. § 1125(d)), gives US trademark owners the right to sue cybersquatters in federal court rather than relying solely on the faster but contractually limited UDRP. A plaintiff must show that the defendant registered, trafficked in, or used a domain that is identical or confusingly similar to a distinctive mark, with a bad-faith intent to profit. Courts assess bad faith using a nine-factor statutory test covering, among other things, the registrant's prior use of the name, any offer to sell at a price above out-of-pocket costs, and the degree of similarity to the mark. Unique to the ACPA: in rem jurisdiction allows a trademark owner to sue the domain itself when the registrant is outside US personal jurisdiction, and statutory damages range from $1,000 to $100,000 per domain at the court's discretion.
Related keywords
- ACPA
- anticybersquatting
- US trademark law
- domain dispute
- federal court
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.