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Dell Suit Reveals Lucrative Domain Name Trade
alphadogg writes "A civil suit filed in Florida by Dell and its Alienware subsidiary is giving insight into the enormous sums of money that can be made by creating Web pages full of advertising links. In October, Dell sued a group of domain registrars, alleging the companies bought more than 1,100 domain names with trademark-infringing characteristics, such as 'dellbatterrogram.com' in order to put advertising links on the pages. The practice, known as typosquatting, is illegal. Dell alleges that the group of defendants, mostly registered offshore, control over a million domain names and have used over 64 million." The article also mentions Google's love-hate relationship with such shady advertising practices.
Yes, I think it is pretty ironic that the very article the summary is linked to is infested with crappy ads.
My humor is probably your flamebait
why would anyone "accidentally" type in dellbatterogram.com? I could understand for instance delll.com or something possible to mistakenly type, but that makes no sense.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
The practice, known as typosquatting, is illegal. Dell alleges that the group of defendants, mostly registered offshore, control over a million domain names and have used over 64 million."
Question One: Illegal where? The U.S.?
Question Two: these companies are registered in other countries - perhaps typosquatting is legal there?
Question Three: How does one define typosquatting? dellstuff.com? delltrucking.com? dall.com?
Three Squirrels
Dell has been after its domains since 2001:
http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2001/d2001-0361.html
For example; notice the subtle content differences between: ...and this
...and so on...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/ and this
http://www.whitehouse.com/
http://www.whitehouse.net/
http://www.whitehouse.pl/
(You can do the same thing with: http://www.dell.com/ http://www.dell.net/ etc...)
The practice, known as typosquatting, is illegal.
I know it's a scum practice, but does anyone know why on earth it's illegal? If someone did that and tried to mimic the "real" page in order to get customer info (like a phishing scam), I can see why that should be illegal. But if the typo page just has a bunch of ads, what's wrong with that?
origin. I doubt they are getting much return for their $ from the all advert sites.
Interesting to see some of the numbers though.
I remember there was a salshdot.org domain at one point which (I think) displayed slashdot in a frame. There was also amozon.com
Holy crap! You realized how many 1000's upon 1000's of people have to go to the wrong site and click on something? From what I can tell, this site made no attempt to look like anything but an ad site. They were just mooching on peoples' typos. There are a lot more idiots in the world than I thought....
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
The short answer is: it's not entirely clear what the law on this is, because not enough cases have come to court anywhere.
.com where the registrar is U.S.-based and therefore subject to U.S. law.
A longer answer:
Nearly all countries recognize some form of trademark protection, and some egregious examples of typosquatting would be illegal anywhere the trademark is registered. However countries differ on what particularly is required for a trademark claim. In some countries, sitting on the domain name and putting some ads there wouldn't be infringement, because it isn't competing with the original mark, and trademark law is at its strongest and most consistent in prohibiting competition using the mark. For example, you can't start a company MacDonald's that sells hamburgers in competition with the McDonald's chain, and put your website at macdonalds.com. But can you register macdonalds.com and put ads there? Depends on the country. Does it depend on whether the ads are related to hamburgers or not? Also depends on the country, and even within countries, possibly on the judge.
Within the United States claims are somewhat easier, based on the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999, which explicitly outlaws cybersquatting and typosquatting done with "a bad faith intent to profit from that mark". So registering a typo site and putting up a rant there is ok---the owner of fallwell.com won his case against Jerry Falwell. But profiting from it in "bad faith" is not, and this is usually taken to include typosquatting with GoogleAds.
Now can that be enforced against foreign companies? Possibly. If they're making their money from GoogleAds, the court can pretty trivially seize that income stream, since Google is a U.S. company, and possibly order Google to stop serving ads on that site. More controversially, the Act authorizes courts to order that a domain name registration be canceled or transfered to the trademark owner. Although the internet itself is international, this might be enforceable if the domain name is in a registry like
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
1) Buy millions of domain names that have typos in them
2)
3) Profit
When domain names were $35 a year from your one and only source, this practice seemed beyond stupid. One adjustment in the domain industry created 1 or 2 new ones and great impacted several more. Gotta love those markets
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Dell for this.
Seriously, if DELL only had ONE primary domain name "Dell.com" rather than the myriad of other "domain names" and properly used host name designations for various ads, then they wouldn't have an issue, would they?
www.dell.com
education.dell.com
support.dell.com
deals.dell.com
dudeyourgettinga.dell.com
farmerinthe.dell.com
Can anyone give me a good reason why dell needs 100s of related sites that can't be done just as easily as proper hostnames?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
whitehouse.com is no longer smutt? the internet really is changing... kind makes me miss the days of yore...
it was well known throughout my time in public schools...
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
not sure that you will like it; I'm not sure that I like it either,
but the good reason is because they have the right to buy a domain name, and the money to pay for it.
For the very reason that typosquatting is effective at making money, its also valuable for the actual owner to use to prevent losses by typosquatting and to make it easier to find their site. Since there isn't a cap on number of domains you can own afaik its left to a personal decision whether you should be efficient and preserve webspace for others or to utilize finances to take up more real estate.
It's sorta like asking why build a one story store that has X floorspace when you could build a two (or more) story builiding, providing the same amount of space (or more) spread out in floors which will save some land space that could be used for other stores / parking / whatever. its complicated for one, and second: people feel like theres less risk. much higher chance for single point of failure in the tall building than the long short one.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
Trademark law isn't hard and fast but the basis of it is that when you register a mark, people can't use one that is similar to it. So even though your registration is on a particular mark, someone can't just change one little thing and then use it, since it is your brand.
How similar something can be depends on how similar your product is. If you are selling the exact same thing, then pretty much anything resembling the mark is off limits since it could confuse people. If your product is really different, often you can have a good degree of similarity and not have a problem (the same name for example).
In the case of typosquating you are pretty much universally fucked since the whole purpose is to play on consumer confusion. If your registered del.com and sold sausages from a deli, you'd have a good case that the similarity to Dell wasn't intentional and it's all in good faith. However if your register del.com and fill it with spam ads for buying computers, well you've got zero case at all.
Article actually details Google's love-love relationship with this practice. Now they just need to come up with a way to get a taste of the 419 action. You know, do no evil, but if other people are doing evil get a percentage.
Dell takes the position that 64 million domain names ought to be enough for anyone.
1. Find the first instance of this practice. 2. Issue the instigater a patent and supply him with the listings of several patent trolls, 3. Let them litigate the typo-squatters out of existance. 4. Relax!!
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
It's possible to filter out the bottom-feeders, as we do at SiteTruth. We're looking at this mostly from the user side. But there are also serious complaints about "domaining" from the advertiser side.
Clicks on "typosquatting" sites don't lead to many sales. Basically, they're targeting users who click on random stuff. That doesn't mean those users actually buy based on their mis-aimed clicks. More likely, some real company that advertised via Google AdWords is getting money sucked out of their ad budget without much return. The analytics people are skeptical of the claims of domainers.
The Direct Marketing Association has a white paper for advertisers which recommends that advertisers filter those sites out of their campaigns. "The traffic produced by sites utilizing the practices described above is almost always absolutely worthless. To ensure contextual advertising effectiveness, advertisers should eliminate these sites from their campaigns." Google, however, makes this difficult, because Google doesn't tell the advertiser where their ads are running, and requires excluding each individual domainer site by name, from Google's user interface. There's no "disable all bottom feeders" option. This is a problem.
The DMA's white paper suggests ways an advertiser can defend their ad costs against domainers, automatically accumulating a list of domainers feeding them clicks, discovering which sites generate poor returns, and excluding them. But with clicks coming in randomly from hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of constantly changing bottom-feeder sites, blacklisting the bogus sites is like spam filtering by source address - it's a losing battle.
The advertiser community is getting wise to this. We may see some pushback from that side.
In the case of Reuger vs Ruger, are you suggesting that the issue would raise the temperature and pressure to such a degree that someone would break out guns?
Sweet. I have a company named Delm, now I can sue this "dell" company for typosquatting my site for millions.
I mean, when I go to dell.com I'm bombarded with ads.
IANAL, but I very much doubt that it is illegal, at least in itself. TFA states that typosquatting is illegal, but doesn't cite any laws. Not very professional.
Another stupid error: this is not typosquatting. Where's the typo? Nobody ends up at "dellbatterrogram.com" because they mistyped the domain name. This is better described as search engine spamming. Which I actually find much more obnoxious than typosquating, since it's harder to avoid, and a bigger waste of time.
When Google turns up a site like this, I always click on the "Help us improve" link at the bottom of the search results page and report the spamming. Not sure how much good that does.
I lost a domain to this kind of crap today. I know plenty of you out there will ask me "why didnt you renew it?". Well, in my case I couldnt. I registered the domain with 1and1 and when i terminated my account with them they unlocked all of my domains and provided me with registration transfer auth codes. Granted I should have attempted to transfer it earlier (1and1 does not provide you with expiration warnings via email if you do not have an account with them)-- Once it expired and ended up on 1and1's 'pendingDelete' list I could do nothing about it. The domain I lost was cadencesmith.com, a photo gallery for my 15 month old daughter, which is now a crappile of pay per click ads. I watched the domain all day waiting for it to disappear from 1and1s dns, and within minutes of when it did it was snatched up. This is the second domain i've lost to this crap. The previous being switch2linux.com. I have had _no_ luck contacting the new owners to get either of them back.
I clicked the link, and didn't see any ads at all...it's really well worth the cost...FREE!
Offshore or not in the United States? Where the two terms do overlap, they are not the same thing. If they were truly offshore there would be no [need] for legal recourse. Just hire someone to put a missile into their server farm. It'd be cheaper than lawyers anyway.
For that matter, what's stopping people from hiring someone to physically assault a land based facility in a country that does not comply with internet regulations?
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
..get out a scripting book and script out a random clicking gizmo to run up the ad charges and ruin someone, I suspect I would just ruin someone who has no idea what's happening on these clicksites.
If only I could find a way to make the weezils pay for the clicks.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Dell.com appears to be one of the most typosquatted domains around:
http://typosquat24.com/dell.com/ (91%)
http://typosquat24.com/google.com/ (91%)
http://typosquat24.com/youtube.com/ (84%)
http://typosquat24.com/myspace.com/ (83%)
...the group of defendants, mostly registered offshore, control over a million domain names and have used over 64 million
How can they use over 64M if they only control over a million? well, 64 million is over a million, but it smells like a typo to me...
I'd be the last to want to pump more heaps of cash into Verisign's bankaccount, but if these leaches are making so much money from a couple of million of domain names, perhaps domain names simply have become too cheap?
If domain names were to cost $100 to register (like they did in the last decade, $50/year 2 years in advance), I guess we could get rid of this kind of domain name pollution. Removing 'kiting' is the first step, but pumping up the price might be a good second step. Plus, you'd avoid a lot of those similar leaches that want to charge you $500 for an obscure domain name. It simply wouldn't be profitable for them anymore.
This sig is intentionally left blank
"So who has the link to the post with this in 1998?
...
1) Buy millions of domain names that have typos in them
2)
3) Profit "
You thought you were kidding wern't you? But it wasn't in the form you thought. It was this:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.html
The month this article hit the newsstands Internic registration turnaround went from three days to eleven weeks because of the volume. It took a year to normalize but never got down to 3 days again.
The NSF was subsidizing the Internic for US post secondary educational institutions and after this, gave up. They asked the FNCIC to decide what to do, they told the NSF to direct NSI to begin charging for domain names.
But, by this time pissed off companies worldwide who began rattling sabres at IANA because "somebody has stolen their domain; IANA not having any legal personality Postel was scared shitless and began to look for institutionalization. He did but lost all authority - when he tried to get the root servers to point to him and not NSI's A root but the feds were so in the loop he was literally threatened with guys in black suits in black cars.
He had now been made redundent, died shortly after leaving is with the multimillion dollar per year atrocity known as ICANN.
No other single article in the history of the internet changed the landscape as much as this one did. It probably would have happened eventually anyway, but for you chaos theory fans, this is one hell of an example.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I don't see any hate from Google for sites covered with Google ads. Yeah that would be really tough to code.
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1) Eliminate the domain tasting and kiting crap (which is ICANN's fault) and typosquatting becomes less profitable. You should NOT be able to register a domain name, use it but keep getting refunds. ;)
2) Where does all that money come from? Who is paying for all those ads?
3) Get people to spell better
*cough*Verisign*cough*
It's always been a lucrative business.
I would have thought that the concepts of "sufficiently paranoid" and "on /." were, if not oxymorons on the level of "military intelligence", at least a Felix-and-Oscar-class odd couple. For the avid Slashdotter, paranoia is never sufficient.... reminds me of these folks; a good working definition of "minimal signal-to-noise ratio".
I think the biggest reason /.ers should get up set about this is that it is seriously cutting into the adsense revenue that helps support many open source programs. I know my ad revenues are going down and down and its now to the point where my objection to ads is worth more to me than the pennys I get while a years ago the ads paid for new server.
I wonder if the correct solution for this is to send a wakeup call to google. Have every open source project pull their adsnese ads on one day and don't put them back until google comes up with a solution real solution other than some words in their terms and conditions.