The Poetry Society’s director, Christina Patterson, said:
"We've spent five years building up our award-winning web site and it's pretty devastating to have the name taken over like this. We were getting about 300,000 hits a month. It seems remarkable that a company promoting such an eclectic range of business interests should use the name of a charity set up to promote poetry."
The Poetry Society is taking unspecified legal action to recover the domain name. Currently, its web site and e-mail addresses are using the domain name poetrysociety.org.uk.
The most common reason for unintentional loss of a domain name is when the owner forgets to renew the name, often because a renewal notice is overlooked or not received, the latter usually being because the owner did not keep his contact details up to date. However, names are also lost because of errors on the part of a registrar, or because of fraud or domain name hijacking. Major companies have fallen victim to such problems.
In September 2001, anti-virus software company Symantec forgot to renew its Norton.com domain name. Microsoft also forgot to renew its Passport.com domain name. Individuals re-registered the names on both occasions, but generously registered them in the names of the companies. Both Symantec and Microsoft were also involved in incidents where they forgot to renew their digital certificates.
To address the issue of domain names being lost unintentionally, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the technical co-ordination body of the internet, recently proposed a one month grace period for expired domain names.