What Is Cybersquatting? A Small Business Owner's Guide

Your brand is your handshake with the world. Over the last two decades, we have poured our hearts into building our name, mastering our craftsmanship, and earning customer trust. But in the digital age, your reputation is only as secure as your online presence. Many independent business owners assume that simply registering a trademark or owning their primary website domain is enough to protect them. Unfortunately, it is often just the beginning.

Cybersquatting happens when someone snatches up a domain name very similar to an established brand's trademark, usually to take advantage of that brand's reputation. A related tactic is known as "typosquatting," where people register common misspellings or variations, like switching between singular and plural forms of a business name. The aim is straightforward: to attract traffic from users who accidentally type the wrong URL while trying to reach a trusted company. A company's name embodies years of hard work, customer trust, product quality, and goodwill built over time. 

Healthy competition drives business owners to make better products, provide superior service, and build authentic reputations. However, a business crosses an ethical and legal line when it uses a competitor’s name or trademark to intercept people actively searching for that company. Rather than winning over a customer through its own unique identity and marketing, a confusing domain redirect trades entirely upon the recognition and goodwill built by someone else. Under the UDRP, bad faith can be established when a domain is intentionally used for commercial gain by creating a likelihood of confusion with an established trademark regarding its source, sponsorship, or affiliation. In our case, the WIPO panels reviewed the evidence we submitted and ruled in our favor, ordering the transfer of both disputed domains to McClure Tables.

For years, we operated under the assumption that addressing domain variations would be an uphill, prohibitively expensive legal battle. It wasn't until we dug into the public record that we realized how clear-cut the evidence truly was. Independent Internet Archive records revealed that this was not a temporary mistake. A permanent HTTP 301 redirect was configured to intercept our web traffic and send users directly to a competing commercial site.

• 2003: McClure Tables begins continuous commercial use of its business name and mark.
• 2008: Archived website records show McClure prominently offering shuffleboard tables online.
• 2013 & 2014: Third-party registrations are quietly filed for the variant domains.
• February 3, 2018: Internet Archive records show <mcclureshuffleboards.com> issuing a permanent HTTP 301 redirect to a competing website.
• August 6, 2018: Internet Archive records show <mccluretable.com> doing the exact same.
• Spring/Summer 2026: McClure Tables files two formal complaints with WIPO.
• May 7 & July 31, 2026: Two separate, independent WIPO panelists review the merits, find textbook bad faith registration and use, and order the immediate transfer of both domains to McClure Tables.

We believe in full transparency and letting the facts speak for themselves. We welcome our customers, peers, and fellow business owners to review the official public records directly to understand how the panels evaluated fair trade and business ethics:

• [Read the Full WIPO Decision: Case No. D2026-1224 (<mccluretable.com>)]

• [Read the Full WIPO Decision: Case No. D2026-2419 (<mcclureshuffleboards.com>)]

This challenge reinforced our core philosophy: controlling every single aspect of our business. In a modern economy where many brands act as mere middlemen, outsourcing their production to overseas contract manufacturers and shotgun-blasting their logos across every retail channel, we chose a different path. We manufacture everything in-house. We source our raw materials locally, like hard Michigan maple, and we sell exclusively direct-to-consumer. By avoiding wholesale networks and distributors, we don't have to build third-party markups into our prices. We give the maximum possible value directly to the person buying the table. This is also why you will never find McClure Tables on Amazon. Wholesaling to massive online platforms often forces brands into restrictive policies where the platform can step in, control the price, or dictate the relationship. While our clean direct-to-consumer model means we qualify for strict brand exclusions from those marketplace dynamics, we choose to bypass them entirely. Why give a massive marketplace a cut that we would just have to pass on to you?

If you are a business owner facing a similar issue, we want you to avoid our mistakes. We initially filed a single complaint for the first domain, McCluretable.com. We realized, and have for years, that this other company was redirecting traffic from our main site using this domain, the same as our domain, but without the "s".

After that first decision, we used ChatGPT and a domain search tool to look for other similar names. We found McClureshuffleboards.com, a domain nearly identical to our McClureshuffleboard.com, but with an extra "s".

Unfortunately, we discovered this second domain only after filing our first complaint. That meant filing a separate WIPO complaint at an additional cost of $1,500. If we had conducted a comprehensive domain search before filing, we could have included both domains in one complaint and avoided that additional expense.

1. Run a thorough search for all singular, plural, and descriptive variations of your brand name. Use a tool like HTTPStatus
2. Use the Wayback Machine to document historical redirect behavior on specific dates.
3. Secure all screenshots and URL evidence before the owner makes any changes to the domains.

We are not publishing this guide to look backward or dwell on bad practices. We are publishing it because we wish someone had handed us a guide like this years ago. Take care of your brand, control your manufacturing, and protect the name you build. At the end of the day, protecting our trademark isn't about attacking others; it's about safeguarding the real, physical work that happens on our shop floor every week.

We're excited to share a teaser trailer for our upcoming documentary, Made Where the Hardwoods Grow. The film explores the history of shuffleboard and follows our tables from Michigan's hardwood forests through our workshop to their final installation in our customers' homes.

It's a story about the people, the materials, and the craftsmanship behind a tradition that has nearly disappeared.