Anyone have any experience with a cybersquatter? I decided on Christmas to start a local business in Maine and protected a .me site as I wanted a local name/feel. I then talked to some business folks from the state and decided that trademarking the business name was the best course of action. I got a state of Maine trademark and on the day it issued someone else in the state jumped in and registered my business name.com which means to me that the state must at that point have made my business name public.

From my reading I'm pretty sure this is illegal cybersquatting so I informed that person that it was my trademark and sent e-mails to the Secretary of State and ICANN. Was this wise? Anyone have any advice? Now I notice that my webpage has a "Certificate Error".

Maybe this is pathetic, but I'm actually loosing some sleep over this. You pour a lot into a startup and this just seems so scummy.

I wish I had registered both webnames before trademarking to avoid this kind of garbage. I was just trying to keep my business name relatively secret until I got my trademark....ironic that getting the trademark led to this.

Thanks,
Greg

Their main purpose is probably trying to sell the .com name to you, otherwise its not much use to them unless they are trying to stifle competition.
You may want to investigate how successful your original name.com would really be, and maybe get advice on how to get any name high on search outcomes.
Unless its a killer name for that type of business, their are other equal or more important factors, if you are trying to get publicity from internet searches.

I don't think they could charge you much because it really doesn't do them any good. The same thing happened about 10 years ago to me but they didn't get the .org so I took it I think. .com would be better. There are other tricks like using your name as the .com site but I don't know how that works. Good luck.