It can go both ways (Score 1)

Take for instance gwbush.com for the period from about 1999 to 2001. This was a great, but completely parody-related, website making fun of Bush. The RNC demanded that the webmaster, Zach Exley, give up every domain that he had registered. He refused. They threatened to sue him but to my knowledge never did so. Then the Republicans bought every single domain they could possibly think of that had words such as Bush-Sucks in it. They have since sold most of these domains back to the random public, but the fact that a major political party tried to suppress criticism through massively buying domain names against third parties is amusing to me. This has been going on for some years now, obviously.