Buying Competitor's URL Variations - Good or Bad Idea?

[dvdtvshows1]

Alright we did it, but I'm still not sure if it was a really really good or a really realy bad idea. We bought: barnesand noble.tv and borders.tv and ccvideo.tv and deepdiscountdvd.tv and jrmusic.tv and towerrecords.tv . We forwarded them all to our main site and added an entry in our banner head to explain the URLs that we own. You can see this at:
http://www.dvdtvshows.com/StoreFront.bok
So everybody, what are your opinions, did we go too far?

We are trying to sell the site and were hoping that one of our big competitors would buy it just to get rid of us. But so far we haven't even been able to get in touch with the mergers and acquisitions departments in these firms.

Your opinions would be greatly appreciated.

[dvdtvshows1]

Well one of the firms involved finally noticed the use and had their lawyers send us a nasty note. No interest in actually buying our company. Just a "give us the URL for free right now" and "give us all the earnings you have gained from using the URL".
So now I have to pay my lawyer to respond. Since the URL was readily available for about 5 years and they did not use it, I could claim that it was abandoned property, and fair game. But the whole making sure people did not mistake us for them and still getting something positive out of it is too much work. Thankfully, we never set it up to actually get sales from it, so at least we won't be out of pocket on that. Any comments?

[JKomp]

I think it's terribly bad practice. Certainly not conducive to a positive relationship with your competitors.

[vwebworld]

It is crazy to think that if you purchase a domain name
of a highly recognized brand, that you can retain or
sell that domain.

There is a law against that "cybersquatting". Essentially,
unless YOU can prove that you used or had
ownership of that brand before barnes and noble then
you can not retain that domain.

The penalties...can be large.

~Roland

[Feydakin]

Too bad he didn't get this advice back in October..

Good luck diging out from this one.. If you can walk away without oweing any money and just giving up the domain I would consider myself lucky and move on..