The .SUCKS people sure made a real splash at this year’s International Trademark Association (“INTA”) meeting featuring thousands of prominent trademark owners and companies. The new generic top level domain (“gTLD”) warned brands to “protect themselves” by buying up their .sucks domain and handed out some unusual favors. Days after the event, .SUCKS now threatens to sue for defamation for people calling them out on their business practices.

After years applications and delays, ICANN (the governing body of all things domain name related) sifted through the applications for the new gTLDs; such applications had been made for .cars, .tiffany, and .amazon. Companies submitted a whopping $185,000 application fee just to be in the running to own a new gTLD. Vox Populi Registry applied for and was granted the .SUCKS domain. Vox, even before the application process was complete, began soliciting trademark owners who would rather not see their brand name come before the disparaging gTLD. For example, Vox would want a trademark owner or company to pay to own the domain walmart.sucks instead of letting the public own it and possibly use it to the trademark owner’s displeasure.

Vox dropped the rate of the domain from $25,000 to $2,500 but this price is still incredibly high. (.com domain name can be purchased for a few dollars per year.) As expected, such efforts have been met with a lot of backlash. Senator John Rockefeller of West Virginia even called this a “predatory shakedown scheme.” And in March 2015, INTA, a group of other trademark attorney associations, and brand owners agreed with this assessment and sent a letter urging ICANN to halt the “predatory scheme” that is being used to “exploit” trademark owners.

At last week’s INTA convention, the who’s who in the trademark world, well really just anyone who wants to hear about trademarks all day and later talk trademarks at receptions (fun stuff), the .sucks people came out in full force. Always at the site of any breaking trademark news, Pirated Thoughts was there to take the photo seen to the right of the .sucks people telling brands to “protect themselves” and buy their company’s .sucks domain and handing out giveaways. Of course we took one of the giveaways and were surprised to discover that the group was handing out condoms. (“Protect yourself,” get it?) Also, a truck was seen with a banner sporting an “INTA.sucks” banner”. This could have been Vox but maybe just was some disgruntled San Diegan angry at all the awful attorneys in town.

After this showing of warning brands to protect themselves, on Monday, Vox release a statement saying that the brand owner’s letter and accusations of “predatory schemes” are false and defamatory and proceeded to threaten legal action. Vox admitted that their domain pricing is higher than usual but claims this is a result of the free market and demand. ICANN is currently looking into the situation but no action has been taken. We are going to have commence a Kickstarter to buy PiratedThoughts.sucks.

