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Dell Suit Reveals Lucrative Domain Name Trade

Posted by kdawson on Tue Feb 05, 2008 03:29 PM
from the pennies-times-millions dept.
Government The Courts The Internet News
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.
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Submission: Dell suit reveals lucrative trade in domain names by alphadogg (971356)
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  • Ironic? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Recovering Hater (833107) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @03:33PM (#22311830)
    Yes, I think it is pretty ironic that the very article the summary is linked to is infested with crappy ads.

    • Re:Ironic? (Score:5, Informative)

      by misleb (129952) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @03:48PM (#22312064)

      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: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by sootman (158191)
            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-le
  • why would anyone "accidentally" type in dellbatterogram.com? I could understand for instance delll.com or something possible to mistakenly type, but that makes no sense.

    • Re:dellbatterogram.com (Score:5, Informative)

      by WhiteDragon (4556) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @03:37PM (#22311902) Homepage Journal
      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: (Score:2, Informative)

        by 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... a

      • 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*

    • why would anyone "accidentally" type in dellbatterogram.com? I could understand for instance delll.com or something possible to mistakenly type, but that makes no sense.

      I was first amused at just the name "dellbatterogram", but now I anxiously await a defense in which the Dell legal time tries to convince the Court of the company's new, secretly developed e-mail alternative: "You're honor, I give you...the Batterogram! If you thought 'squirting' someone a picture of your kids was cool, wait until you 'batter' them!"

    • Re:dellbatterogram.com (Score:5, Funny)

      by Yetihehe (971185) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @03:41PM (#22311956)
      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".

  • Nitpicking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rueger (210566) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @03:36PM (#22311896) Homepage
    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?
    • I'm sure what they'd like to say is, if your site generates a lot of traffic, then it infringes on our copyright because people are 1) exposed to our advertising, 2) expecting to get to our site, 3) landing on yours by mistake, and 4) anxious to get out of there and back to the site they were looking for originally. It's a bit like having one really good pizza hut in town in a large office building with 900 other piza hutt's and pizzo hot's, etc. and then them trying to bust people who wander into the wron
    • Well in this particular case, it would seem that Dell's case is at least a little weak, but I'm all for them suing the heck out of domain squatters. Practically any meaningful URL out there is now just an ad trap. If somebody's not willing to put up at least some content, they shouldn't own the domain.
        • Okay, at least you're using email, I consider that content. A site that only exists to display ads isn't content. My opposition is to people buying up domains just to sell them again at exorbitant prices, forcing the little guy to get some ridiculous domain that makes no sense based on his legitimate content instead of a domain that would have made sense but he can't afford due to squatters.
    • 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 dange

      • (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.)

        (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.)

        Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire because the "auth

      • 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: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by errxn (108621)
        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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CannonballHead (842625) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @03:52PM (#22312156)

      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: (Score:2, Informative)

        by noidentity (188756)

        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!

      • 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, o

    • Question One: Illegal where? The U.S.?

      IANAL, but the fact that the suit was filed in Florida tells me that its US law that has been infringed.

      Question Two: these companies are registered in other countries - perhaps typosquatting is legal there?

      Could be, and if said companies don't actually do business in the US, then Dell may be SOL; but if those companies have US assets, or even do business with US companies there could be consequences.

      Question Three: How does one define typosquatting? dellstuff.com? delltrucking.com? dall.com?

      Obviously which urls infringe and which do not will be up to the judge to decide. I suspect that intent plays a great part in this sort of case.

      • Question Two: these companies are registered in other countries - perhaps typosquatting is legal there?

        Could be, and if said companies don't actually do business in the US, then Dell may be SOL; but if those companies have US assets, or even do business with US companies there could be consequences.

        They have .com names. Several millions of them . Take those away as they are owned by a american company. Even those that are NOT affected by the lawsuit.

        To me domain names are assets as well.

    • answers vary (Score:5, Informative)

      by Trepidity (597) <delirium-slashdotNO@SPAMhackish.org> on Tuesday February 05 2008, @04:08PM (#22312404) Homepage
      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.
    • Question Three: How does one define typosquatting? dellstuff.com? delltrucking.com? dall.com?

      I imagine it depends on you showing a 'valid' reason for the name. For example if your surname is 'Dall' and you register 'Dall.com' presumably it would be a lot harder to claim typo-squatting than registering 'hallmart.com' and using it to sell greetings cards and cheap stuff....although in the latter case you might get away with it since they would probably end up fighting over who should get the domain name!
  • For example; notice the subtle content differences between:
    http://www.whitehouse.gov/ [whitehouse.gov] and this
    http://www.whitehouse.com/ [whitehouse.com] ...and this
    http://www.whitehouse.net/ [whitehouse.net]
    http://www.whitehouse.pl/ [whitehouse.pl]
    ...and so on...
    (You can do the same thing with: http://www.dell.com/ [dell.com] http://www.dell.net/ [dell.net] etc...)

  • typosquatting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rasputin465 (1032646) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @03:47PM (#22312056)
    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?
    • Because the big US companies don't like it, and the big US companies pay the US government. Therefore the US government makes it illegal, while the rest of the world goes "eh? who cares?".

      You must be new here, Mr 1 Million+ user id.

      • 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 opposi

        • >People who want to get a useful name for use in their legitimate businesses cannot.

          I certainly agree with that.

          I once worked for an Irish company that changed its name to one purely so it could obtain all the domains it wanted.

          Even my stupid slashdot user name is unavailable - www.mustafap.com. I was going to register it for incontinence products, and have now been thwarted. Damm those domain name squatters!

        • Are these big companies ethical? Of course they're not. Business is business. I don't trust dell any more than I trust the squatters. At least the squatters don't claim to be ethical.
    • Because you're making money off someone else's trademark. It's the same reason I can't open a department store called "Wall Mart."
      • What if you're in the Plaster and/or Particleboard business?
      • Yeah, that's what I was thinking, except that you can't trademark a typo. The only way I could see trademark infringement would be if they somehow copied logo or style (like this [collegehumor.com]) from the target site.

  • advertisers should track revenue based on click (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Babu 'God' Hoover (1213422) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @03:49PM (#22312094)
    origin. I doubt they are getting much return for their $ from the all advert sites.

  • It's not a new concept (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 91degrees (207121) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @03:49PM (#22312100) Journal
    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?! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Itninja (937614) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @03:59PM (#22312246) Homepage
    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....
  • So who has the link to the post with this in 1998?

    1) Buy millions of domain names that have typos in them
    2) ...
    3) Profit

    When domain names were $35 a year from your one and only source, this practice seemed beyond stupid. One adjustment in the domain industry created 1 or 2 new ones and great impacted several more. Gotta love those markets ;)

  • I blame ..... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Archangel Michael (180766) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @04:14PM (#22312502) Journal
    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: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by viking099 (70446)
      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

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by AKAImBatman (238306)

        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

    • not sure that you will like it; I'm not sure that I like it either,
      but the good reason is because they have the right to buy a domain name, and the money to pay for it.

      For the very reason that typosquatting is effective at making money, its also valuable for the actual owner to use to prevent losses by typosquatting and to make it easier to find their site. Since there isn't a cap on number of domains you can own afaik its left to a personal decision whether you should be efficient and preserve webspace fo

  • Bottom-feeder filtering from the advertiser side (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats (122034) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @04:57PM (#22313198) Homepage

    It's possible to filter out the bottom-feeders, as we do at SiteTruth. [sitetruth.com] 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. [caslon.com.au]

    The Direct Marketing Association has a white paper for advertisers [the-dma.org] 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.

  • sniped domain (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SolusSD (680489) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @05:20PM (#22313596) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

      by oborseth (636455) on Tuesday February 05 2008, @07:01PM (#22315014)
      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.

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