Typosquatting Held Illegal

Artagel writes: "The Federal Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (covering appeals from federal courts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands) has whacked a cybersquatter for registering misspellings("typosquatting")of the Joe Cartoon homepage. The Third Circuit is the place the ACLU brings suits when it wants to challenge federal laws regulating speech. It brought ACLU v. Reno case (first big internet free speech case) in the Third Circuit. I don't think that, in general, there is a friendlier forum for a free speech case, certainly not if the ACLU knows what it is doing. One more in the list of ways to get whacked on the internet. It is a precedent a lot of lower courts are likely to follow."

Comments

Uhh

[Auckerman]

Forgive me, but I'm not sure what the big deal is here. I type a lot of URL's in and at least once or twice a month I'm redirected to someones pr0n site when I was looking for cooking recipes. Certainly not fair use, certainly intented to direct traffic from one intended destination to another, certainly something that dimishes brands.

Couse though stuff like this just ends up allowing a company to smash down a parody site which is within the relm of fair use.....

What about parody

[interstellar_donkey]

Where does the difference lie between a 'typo' and a fair use parody. If I registered a domain called 'lashdot.org' that hosted a site intended to poke fun and 'lashout' at the slashdot community, could Andover claim I was typo squatting?

Who gets to decide what is a legit take-off, and what is an attempt to simply direct traffic to their own site?

Re:What about parody

[Erasmus Darwin]

Where does the difference lie between a 'typo' and a fair use parody.

That's a distinction made by the courts. In this case, the "Joe Cartoon" typo sites consisted of a bunch of banner ads for various products. It was only a few hours after being served with a "cease-and-desist" that the owner of the typo sites changed them to a poorly written "political protest against Joe Cartoon". The judge saw through such a shallow ploy and issued some judicial smack-down against the defendant.

I really recommend reading the judgement (if you can get through the Slashdotting). It's a bit annoying in that they did a bad job converting it to ASCII (footnotes seem to be where each original page ended), but the language isn't particularly lawyerish and the judge clearly and concisely enumerates the legal standards that needed to be satisfied.

Re:What about parody

[www.sorehands.com]

Take a look at Mattel v. MCA Records -- the Barbie Girl case.

The court went stated that you could not use trademark or copyright to silence critism or satire. It also discussed the Cat In the Hat/OJ parody.

This is...

[Deluge]

...a good thing, but only in theory. Companies, no matter how nasty and evil they may be, do not deserve to have some typosquatter leech off their business through exploiting people's tendency to make typos of the company name. But the companies, seeing that they have another precedent that gives them a chance to take away people's domains, will try to abuse this much the same way that etoys did with etoy.

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Put it this way...

[The Gline]

If someone registered theglein.com or something along those lines and then proceeded to use it to a) defame me or b) mislead people, I would have a hard time thinking of a severe enough punishment.

It's akin to when you would pick up a CD that said in huge letters

HARRY BELAFONTE
CALYPSO SONGS

and on closer inspection you saw it really said

HARRY BELAFONTE
completely ignored these terrible
CALYPSO SONGS

(Kudos to MAD Magazine for that particular example.)

Typosquatting has about as much to do with free speech as the quack "American NutriMedical Association" (which gets a LOT of mileage out of being "mistaken" for the AMA) has to do with "freedom of medical choice."

A sound decision

[pgpckt]

While I suspect that several on the slashdot crowd might disagree with this decision on privacy rights or the like, I must say that this decision does make logical sense.

I say this because I believe the laws in the online world should be no different then those in the physical world. This is why I get so upset when courts do not transcribe the same regulations governing laws in place to the domain of the digital community. The rights of someone online are the same IMHO as those in the real world. Historically, the government has been more restrictive with online rights then those in the physical world, which is why I am happily a member of the EFF. But I digress.

When someone has a trademarked name, it is illegal in the real world to use a name that is extremely similar to the trademarked name, just as it is illegal to use the exact same name. The courts get really mad when people pick a similar name with the intent that people will confuse them with the legitimate trademark holder. In this case, the courts said that the person registering a typo name of an entity that has a legitimate claim is unfair, and I agree.

It is important to make sure that this isn't taken to the Nth degree, but I think that, within limits, the decision of the courts is reasonable. I remain hopeful that this means that people squatting on typo names will be forced to vacate. I know that I have mistyped names in the past, and I find it highly irritating to be exposed to content I had no intent to view.

In the conclusion, I think we should respect the courts in this case for protecting the rights of those online in the same way those rights are protected in the real world. If this rule were universally applied, I think we would better off, though I wouldn't mind if the online rules were a touch less restrictive, due to the nature of the public forum that the is the Internet.

Misrepresentation

[krugdm]

If I were a major company, I would be concerned not just that a misspelling of my URL could take a potential customer to a pr0n site, but that the customer may not realize that they have mis-typed the URL and now will never see my site at all. Or file some frivilous lawsuit against me because someone's 8-year-old saw something they shouldn't have and think that I'm responsible.

Typosquatting vs parody

[brown_out]

A lot of talk has been made that this will trash free speech and allow companies to shut down parody sites. I really don't see the connection here. For example, I remember when espm.com was a porn site. That would be an example of typosquatting. The name of the web site has nothing to do with the content and was only picked because it closely resemebles the name of another more famous web site. This person hoped to generate traffic solely through the mistakes of web surfers.
On the other hand, parodies are pretty obvious. The content has everything to do with the name of the web site (i.e. www.f*ckedcompany.com sp?). To say that this case is about shutting doen parody sites is pretty shortsighted. That's just my 2 cents.

Don't underestimate the AOLer...

[Monthenor]

I'm sure there'll be plenty of comments here about people not realizing they've mistyped the URL...but what about people who don't even visit the site? For example, my Post Cereal Online article at gogeek.org didn't raise the furor that Surviving the Boy Band did (and does), but one person emailed me to complain about some Raisin Bran. Now, does http://www.gogeek.org look anything like the actual Post site? No. I finally determined that this person had typed something akin to "Post Cereal Online" in a search engine (we're #5 for that search on Google :) and simply taken my email addy from the abstract. We can pass all the laws and make all the precedent we want, but we can't possibly make the Net safe for people as ignorant as that.

Even scarier, said person appeared to be using a military (Air Force) account...
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This is insane.

[VValdo]

So will the next suit be BMI suing IBM for typosquatting? They can call the ACLU, who won't be able to take the case because they're suing UCLA.

If someone mistypes an URL, that's their problem. As long as the page itself doesn't misrepresent itself, then all URLs are fair game. When I register a domain name, I'm not registering all the domain names with slightly different spellings.. am I? If I own "domain.net" can I sue "domain.com" for typosquatting?

W
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the devil's in the details

[Illserve]

Every time rights get trampled, it starts with a fairly reasonable restriction that is approved without thought of the consequence.

So the big deal is not this case, typo squatting for porn is something we'd all be better off without. Rather it's the consequences that you alude to regarding parody, and a dozen other cases that could be dreamt of once the precedent was set.

Re:the devil's in the details

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Every time rights get trampled, it starts with a fairly reasonable restriction that is approved without thought of the consequence.

So the big deal is not this case, typo squatting for porn is something we'd all be better off without. Rather it's the consequences that you alude to regarding parody, and a dozen other cases that could be dreamt of once the precedent was set.

While your hesitation is understandable, both the judge and the Act explicitly allow "fair use" defenses, and the judge specifically investigated whether the defendant's claim of "protest site" was valid. This implies that, had it been a legitimate protest site (and not a hurriedly retconned one), that would have sufficed.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but we don't have to mistrust everything.

Other ripoffs?

[Alien54]

I really dislike it if someone comes along and tries to piggy-pack on my work, good bad, or otherwise. If I donate my work to Open source, that is one thing. But straight ripoffs - ugh.

An example in point is the Darwin Awards. There is the Original Darwin Awards, done by a college student. This is the one that got the original fame. Then there is the copy cat Darwin Awards site who was better financed, and grabbed the URL first. So the college student sort of got plowed under.

Guess where my sympathy lies.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Lots of law on the subject . . .

[werdna]

Well before the coinage of "typosquatting," companies have been "registering" misdialings of 800 numbers to obtain business, particularly messing with the zero-oh and 1-i typos. Under traditional rules, much depends upon how the typo is used, whether or not the conduct is actionable. To use the number to get initial customers without misleading them has been treated as OK, but to get the customer who thinks he is reserving a Holiday Inn resort, but is actually getting some free dive room in the same viscinity would be nasty.

There was a sixth circuit case involving the use of 1-800-H-zero-LIDAY and 1-800-HOL-one-DAY for hotel reservations, when the customer was immediately notified that this was a budget, low-end reservation facility unrelated to HOLIDAY INNS. The sixth circuit held in that case that Holiday Inn lost.

I haven't read the Third Circuit opinion, but it will be interesting to contrast the two results.