Ask HN: How to go about domain hogging?
Here is the situation: My dad owns a business since '95 here in Germany and owns a worldwide trademark of its name. The name is a made up word that is very unlikely that somebody else actually uses (nothing else shows up on google). We do own the ".de" domain. But we have more and more international customers so it would be nice to also own the ".com" domain. Unfortunately the registrant of the".com" domain is one of those shady domain protection services. They are based in the US. They registered the domain in 2000 and it will expire at the beginning of 2013. The DNS doesn't resolve the domain. As far as I can see the domain has never really been used.
I was thinking about writing a little script and trying to snatch it back next months, but I am not sure if that is the best option. How expensive would it be to take legal actions (just a rough idea $100 or $10,000) and how likely is it to be successful?