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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.
Yes, I think it is pretty ironic that the very article the summary is linked to is infested with crappy ads.
My humor is probably your flamebait
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?
Three Squirrels
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?
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".
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
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?
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
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.
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.
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.