European Prospects

News about Young European Basketball Prospects

Cybersquatting of prospect domain names revealed!

February 9th, 2010 · No Comments

Today, I want to talk about something that I could observe during the last few weeks. I was thinking a bit about it, asking myself if that is something that has a place on this website. But in my opinion, as this website is read not only by scouts, fans, GMs and so on, but also by players and their relatives, I think it is worth to be shared.

I observed over a couple of weeks ago that a lot of domain names featuring the full name of highly interesting basketball prospects have been reserved by one and the same person, an Italian living in Bologna, called Nicola Turrini. Domain names that have been bought by this person are for example: evanfournier.com, pavlinivanov.com, donatasmotiejunas.net, donatasmotiejunas.com or devonvanoostrum.com but there are many more.

I mean, if this person is the agent of these players, I could understand the move, however, this is certainly not the case. I spoke with one person in charge of the career management of one of the above mentioned prospects and I got the clear confirmation that Nicola Turrini is certainly not working for them or in their intent. They were very surprised by this and even scared. I can understand this as we are speaking here about young kids, often even minors.

I do not know what the goal of Mr. Turini is, but it looks like a clear case of Cybersquatting, i.e. the registering of a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. This has been a practice done several times in the past already for brands but is also common in the sports world. Chris Bosh was implicated in such a case recently after he found out that somebody unknown to him registered chrisbosh.com. He went to court with the story and won the battle.

I don’t know if it is worth for the cyber-squatted prospects to go into a juridical battle right now; so far the websites do not feature any content. However, it shows that in these days, the career management of a basketball player becomes more and more non-basketball related as those kind of problems may appear more often in the future.

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