The opera.pl domain name is currently hosting a mirror of the Mozilla Europe site.

This is known as cybersquatting, where one registers well-known trademarks as domain names (with the attempt to sell them back to the trademark owner).

opera.pl was initially owned by one of the Polish opera houses for several years. For some reason they have dropped this domain. A person named Adam Rangotis bought it in the middle of 2003.

For some period of time he redirected opera.pl to Opera’s main site, opera.com. People assumed that Opera had bought the domain name. In fact, some Polish magazines have even used the opera.pl address as a reference in their printed versions.

Opera’s official Polish site is located at www.opera.com/lang/pl.

In an attempt to make some money from his site, he also used to redirect opera.pl to the “Opera Buy pages” using the old affiliate program. However, Opera asked him to stop that practice, which he complied with.

Now this domain name is hosting a mirror of Mozilla Europe.

Microsoft had a similar problem with their polish domain name some time ago. Another person registered the microsoft.pl domain. He then tried to sell in an auction, but was cancelled on demand of the Polish division of Microsoft. The person tried to sell the domain directly to Microsoft. Microsoft filed a suit and won.

Some countries have specific laws against cybersquatting beyond the normal rules of trademark law. The United States, for example, has the U.S. Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA).

ICANN, which is in charge of internet domain names, created the Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policies (UDRP) with guidelines for use when disputes arise regarding the registration of internet names.

I contacted Adam Rangotis, who confirmed to me that he was the owner of the opera.pl domain name, but declined to say what affiliation he has with Mozilla (if any).

I don’t know what the trademark laws are in Poland, but it may seem that Opera will have a hard time getting this domain name from him, if they decided to pursue this. On the one hand, the word “opera” doesn’t only refer to company, it’s also a well know word in the dictionary. After all the browser was named Opera for this reason. On the other hand, using an Opera-like domain name to redirect to its competitor is clearly a shot at Opera.

It’s unclear to me if the Mozilla Foundation can do anything about this legally but this is clearly wrong. They should at least contact this guy and work something out with him.

P.S. Thanks to Andrzej Olaczek, who supplied me with some of the information for this post. And, as always, thanks to Berit Hanson, from Opera Software.

Update #1: According to Marek Stepien, Mozilla Firefox Polish Localization Maintainer, there is no “Mozilla conspiracy against Opera”; it’s just some guy trying to get some money in a not very ethical way. In addition, he will contact Mozilla Europe and ask them to reconfigure their servers not to open the site for non-official hostnames like opera.pl.

Update #2: It has been only a few hours since the original post and now opera.pl no longer redirects to Mozilla Europe.