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

[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: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.