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

Ironic?

[Recovering Hater]

Yes, I think it is pretty ironic that the very article the summary is linked to is infested with crappy ads.

Re:Ironic?

[misleb]

Yes, I think it is pretty ironic that the very article the summary is linked to is infested with crappy ads.

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

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.

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:Nitpicking

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

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. How many votes does the botnet have to place before a targeted site is dropped?

Re:Nitpicking

[errxn]

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.

Re:Nitpicking

[Jester998]

It is as if a million Slashdotters cried out, and then microsoft.com was silenced...

Re:Nitpicking

[noidentity]

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.

Trademark, OK, but what does copyright have to do with it? Please don't confuse people more than they already are!

Re:dellbatterogram.com

[WhiteDragon]

oh, never mind. I just noticed that dell has dellbatteryprogram.com

(despite the fact that any sufficiently paranoid person (this IS /. after all) would never type in anything but dell.com)

Re:dellbatterogram.com

[Yetihehe]

Yeah, talk about typos. I had one time tried to say "Could you hand me salt?" to my girlfriend, but by mistake I said "You stupid b**ch".

typosquatting

[rasputin465]

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?

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

advertisers should track revenue based on click

[Babu 'God' Hoover]

origin. I doubt they are getting much return for their $ from the all advert sites.

It's not a new concept

[91degrees]

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

A million bucks?!

[Itninja]

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....

answers vary

[Trepidity]

The short answer is: it's not entirely clear what the law on this is, because not enough cases have come to court anywhere.

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 .com where the registrar is U.S.-based and therefore subject to U.S. law.

I blame .....

[Archangel Michael]

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?

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.

Re:I blame .....

[AKAImBatman]

no, you don't put www in front of foo

I don't know about anyone else, but I tend to manage many domains with scripts. It's not that hard to auto-deploy a www.foo.dell.com when you deploy foo.dell.com. That way people would find your site even if they screwed up.

If you wanted to get uber-tricky, you could develop a custom DNS provider that would make a best guess as to where you're going. e.g. Anything *.foo.dell.com would always direct to foo.dell.com.

We have the technology. We can build around ignorance and/or stupidity!

My How Times Have Changed

[milsoRgen]

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...

Re:dellbatterogram.com

[vux984]

Could you hand me salt?

Re:dellbatterogram.com

[Anonymous Coward]

oh, never mind. I just noticed that dell has dellbatteryprogram.com

(despite the fact that any sufficiently paranoid person (this IS /. after all) would never type in anything but dell.com) ObFullDisclosure: I work for Dell as a GTS (Now ProSupport) tech support agent.

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.

You are correct

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

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.

Bottom-feeder filtering from the advertiser side

[Animats]

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.

Delm

[cyberfunkr]

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.

sniped domain

[SolusSD]

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.

Re:sniped domain

[oborseth]

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.

Re:dellbatterogram.com

[sootman]

Wow, what a URL. I wonder if heydellpleasesendmeabatterymineblewupkthxbye.com is taken.

OTOH, I guess they didn't want a big red "Click here for information about exploding Dell batteries" link on the homepage. :-)

Though they could have just buried it a bit: Products -> Home and Home Office -> Parts and Accessories -> Batteries -> Exploding *click*