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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.
oh, never mind. I just noticed that dell has dellbatteryprogram.com
/. after all) would never type in anything but dell.com)
(despite the fact that any sufficiently paranoid person (this IS
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Dell has been after its domains since 2001:
http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2001/d2001-0361.html
Really? I found that nearly all internet advertising disappears somewhere around the time AdBlock Plus we released. My theory is that...
*disables adblock*
OMG, WTF? People are still looking at that kind of crap on a daily basis?
The only non-crappy ad is a blocked ad.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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
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.
Trademark, OK, but what does copyright have to do with it? Please don't confuse people more than they already are!
(despite the fact that any sufficiently paranoid person (this IS
We send customers to www.dellbatteryprogram.com to redeem their battery based on the recall. I assume it is for logistics purposes. You put in the battery's serial number and your system's service tag, and it checks a database (mainly looking for date of manufacture and if Sony made the battery) and then sets up a replacement.
I *believe* that the main website still links to that, but since Dell's website is... cluttered... at times, I am not sure if it's easily viewable.
The name servers being used on your domain are hosts of OREGONNAMES.COM which I believe are SnapNames.com name servers. You may be able to get your domain back if you contact them directly. They were recently acquired by DomainSponsor.com / Oversee.net / Revenue.net (same companies) so that may be an avenue to try as well. Good luck.