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.

Comments

Nitpicking

[rueger]

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?

Re:Nitpicking

[Corwn of Amber]

1. Everywhere that trademark is protected
2. See 1
3. There should be an ICANN website where you veto typosquatters - that is, the squatter sites would be removed from the TLD as soon as they get enough votes.

Those sites are a real pain. Ayone here has the skillz to deface some of them so that they host child porn on their front pages? THAT would wake up the people who DECIDE what's legal...

(yeah, yeah, hacking bad. What about whe those sites figure out it's so much more profitable to push malware? It's dangerous to many more people, even though the overwhelming majority of them are too stupid to notice or care.)

Re:Nitpicking

[CannonballHead]

As far as question three is concerned, perhaps the difference is somewhat subjective, but still based on the actual site itself. It's one thing to have an entirely separate company that happens to be close (dall.com, or even dell.net instead of dell.com or something like that)... but it's another to be obviously exploiting a typo to a company simply to sell advertising, or even worse, to do some sort of phishing.

Example: www.microsft.com actually redirects to microsoft.com. del.com goes to dell.com. dell.net goes to an advertising thing, oddly enough.

It seems that there could be a case for essentially copyright infringement, because you are exploiting somebody's misspelling or typo of a copyrighted/tradmarked name. If someone is ripping off "rueger.com" by having "ruger.com" and selling advertising, one might claim that that is an infringement (presuming you trademarked it) on your trademark.

I'm guessing someone probably can't start selling computers from a company called Microsft ... I'm not entirely sure, but it seems that that would be denied because it's essentially infringing on the trademarked Microsoft. On the other hand, something like MicroHardware seems like it'd be perfectly fine... and exists, in fact.

Of course, I'm not a lawyer and don't work for the government, so all this is pretty much an attempt at educated speculation. And to say that I can see where Dell is coming from. I wouldn't want someone ripping off my lucrative business either... of course, to worry about that, first I have to get one. Bother.

Re:typosquatting

[Anonymous EPA]

Actually, nobody likes it. Companies of all sizes in all countries can loose by it (directly through lost business or indirectly through a damaged reputation), and almost all Internet users are annoyed by it quite a lot. Some (e.g. MSIE users) can get particularly annoyed if the squatted name leads them to a page that messes with their computers.

Registering another's trade mark (or one confusingly similar to it) is unlawful and can be challenged through pre-registration examination and a system of oppositions. This has been the case since trade mark registration was new (in the 19th Century in the UK) and is still the case today. It is also unlawful to register a trade mark that one does not have the bona fide intention to use as a trade mark for proper trade mark purposes. This is to stop the system being clogged up by people registering marks speculatively and frivolously. The trade mark system prevents itself being used as a way to make money by simply registering marks, so keeps its real intention (protection of actual trade marks) from being diluted.

Years of working the law have established clear principles for determining whether a trade mark is being used or abused, and whether two marks are so similar as to be confusing.

It is very unfortunate that there is not such a strong self-protective system in place for domain names. Speculative registrations have completely clogged the system and have, effectively, broken it. People who want to get a useful name for use in their legitimate businesses cannot.

AEPA

Re:I blame .....

[viking099]

Because many people are still ignorant of how TLDs can actually work, and it's easier to just buy up a bunch of domains (which they'd probably need to do ANYWAY to prevent this sort of thing in the first place) than it is to explain to someone that yes, foo.dell.com is actually Dell.com, and that no, you don't put www in front of foo, and no, it's not dell.com/foo or foodell.com or any other permutation.

The Dell folks probably have some market experience in this matter, and they probably have it pretty well figured out what the customer expects and will do with regards to accessing the Dell website.

Google

[Professor Mindblow]

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.

Re:Ironic?

[sootman]

I'm not sure how you drastically misunderstood what I said, since you quoted the relevant portion. Let me try to clarify a bit:

"Maybe we'll see another browser? ... I'd be happy with [a browser] that just stripped out all CSS."

Isn't that more or less what you suggested? (Other than that I'm content to wish; I've got more than enough projects to keep me busy already.) Of course such a feature would be optional, and not once did I suggest that Safari should do that by default. SInce I'm not requiring a CSS-less browser should be shoved down anyone's throat, I think the ADA and you would be OK with that. It's all about choice, right?

Besides, it's not CSS that makes pages accessible, it's the application of CSS to a properly-coded page. The whole point of CSS (well, one of the big ones, anyway) is that you can strip the STYLE information completely out of a page and what you're left with is a nice, semantically-marked-up page that can be understood by a human, machine, browser, or any number of accessibility aids. So to say that CSS is a great aid to making pages accessible is not quite correct.

CSS is great. Separating style from content is a Good Thing, and one of the things it does really well is make accessibility easy. (easier) I never, ever said people should stop using CSS. What I did say (more or less) is that I'd like to have a browser that (optionally) ignores it. Rather than looking at a page with text in a needlessly narrow column and having to zoom in and then scroll, I'd rather see text at the full width of the page to begin with. This is for two reasons: 1) zooming in is an extra step 2) once you're zoomed in, when scrolling up and down, it's easy to accidentally scroll side to side a bit, and then it's hard to get the text exactly centered again.