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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.
Considering the US owns most of the domain name servers, does it really matter WHO it's registered to, as opposed to WHO it's registered WITH?
And to your third point... You've got the be kidding me. It says TYPO-squatting. Obviously the presence of the word TYPO in the made up word should hint to the fact that this relates to domains created based off of a TYPO of a valid domain. DellStuff.com would violated a different law. DlelStuff.com would be TYPOsquatting.
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
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
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.
No, because in a matter of minutes after that policy went into effect, [political group] would start the underground ballot stuffing campaign to remove the TLD for [rival political group]. There are a thousand other ways that this would be abused, pick your favorite.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
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.
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.
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.
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.