Notorious typosquatter, John Zuccarini, who served pornographic advertisements on domains such as Bobthebiulder.com and teltubbies.com has been fined again by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. John Zuccarini has agreed to give up $164,000 in typosquatting revenue he is alleged to have raked in, the FTC said Tuesday in a statement. Five years ago, a federal court had barred Zuccarini from registering domains that are misspellings of legitimate brands... more»
The wrangling around the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) is one of those issues that creeps inexorably forward and is hard to follow unless you're really focusing. So here is a quick, if longish, overview: CALEA is a 1994 statute that requires telephone companies to design their services so that they are easily tappable by law enforcement in need of "call-identifying information." Back in August 2005, following a request from the Dept. of Justice, the Commission moved swiftly to impose CALEA obligations on providers of broadband access services and "interconnected VoIP" services... more»
A California man who was found guilty earlier this year for operating a sophisticated phishing scheme that attempted to deceive thousands of AOL users has now received a prison sentence of 70 months -- a fraction of the 101 years he could have been given. InformationWeek reports: "In the first jury conviction under the Can-Spam Act of 2003, Jeffrey Brett Goodin, of Azusa, Calif., was convicted of sending thousands of e-mails set up to appear to be from AOL's billing department to the company's users, prompting them to reply with personal and credit-card information. He then used the information to make unauthorized purchases, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles." more»
Defendant iREIT filed its answer on May 25, 2007, to the recent complaint by Verizon alleging cybersquatting. As in the prior article, these are the public court documents and nothing has been proven by either side in a court of law. more»
Business 2.0 Magazine is running a front page story on Kevin Ham, considered as one of the most powerful "domainer", and how he has managed to build a $300 million empire using everything from domain tasting to typo-squatting the entire nation of Cameroon. From the article, "Ham's people installed a line of software, called a 'wildcard,' that reroutes traffic addressed to any .cm domain name that isn't registered. In the case of Cameroon, a country of 18 million..." more»
International organisations should step in to prevent the "tasting," "kiting" and "spying" related to Internet domain names, say representatives from the US telecommunications and trademark industries. These new activities are dramatically altering online commerce and impacting legitimate businesses, and the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) should take action, they say. The US Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) had too many loopholes given the actual trends in the domain name secondary market, said Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate general counsel for Verizon, and Marilyn Cade, former AT&T lobbyist and now consultant on Internet and technology issues... more»
Starbucks chairman and founder, Mr. Schultz's venture capital firm, Seattle-based Maveron, and H. Ross Perot's investment arm last month plowed $38 million into iREIT, a Houston-based company that has been accused of typosquatting by telecom giant Verizon. But earlier this year, Maveron also invested in Aliso Viejo, California-based CitizenHawk, which makes software that helps trademark holders identify typosquatters and initiate legal action against them. more»
BusinessWeek is running a column called 'Brandjacking' on the Web. In summary, nobody likes deliberate cybersquatting or typosquatting. But if Typo domain-names did not exist, the traffic would continue to flow to Microsoft or Google via the browser's error search where those very large companies would make money in the same manner as the 'evil cybersquatters'... more»
WIPO just published a decision regarding the domain dispute over the britishmuseum.org domain name. At first glance, everything seems alright. The world famous British Museum won in a default judgment as the current registrant (the respondent) never replied). However, drill a little deeper and something is amiss. The "parties" section of the case lists the respondent as "British Museum Resources, Limited, West Bay, George Town, Kentucky, United States of America." more»
Cybersquatting is so 2000, or so we thought. The Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) at WIPO has been chugging along for several years now, methodically determining if complainants IP rights have been violated and reassigning "ownership" of domain names. Typically, the cases are fairly boring. But some recent developments in the world of 800 lb search gorillas, Google and Baidu, suggests that the regime could be faced with substantial pressure in the near future. more»
Record-breaking domain sales, acquisitions, and growing industry credibility all highlight a critical year for the domain name industry. The domain name industry had a heck of a year. It's impossible to rank the top news stories of 2006, but I'm going to make an attempt... Let's talk about it before the end of the year; then let's look forward to a fantastic 2007. more»
It has been over a year since I posted "The Non-Parity of the UDRP", how little did I know then compared to now! Since that posting, the corporations and their lawyers have given me a crash course in the law and I have learned much. There are many tricks that corporations will play on a domain name registrant in order to silence criticism of the corporation and to violate the registrants right of freedom of expression without frontiers. The UDRP Administrative Proceedings is one such trick... more»
Internet domain name arbitration disputes have risen by more than a quarter since January 2005 -- despite the expansion of generic top-level domain addresses like .biz and .info -- as cybersquatters find more sophisticated ways of encroaching on legitimate Web sites.
...Typosquatting, a form of cybersquatting that involves capturing another company's Web traffic by registering misspelled versions of a well-known Internet site or brand name, is driving much of the growth in domain-name disputes, according to intellectual property lawyers. more»
In a recent article, eWeek reports on researchers at Microsoft revealing large-scale, typo-squatting schemes that use "multi-layer URL redirection to game Google's AdSense for domains program". According to this report, the Microsoft Research Systems Management Research Group succeeded in tracking a ring of typo-squatters registering misspelled domain names that generated traffic for serving advertising from Google. more»
A recent decision by a federal court in Virginia illustrates some interesting legal issues that arise from the global nature of the domain name system. It also highlights a powerful mechanism under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act ("ACPA") by which a plaintiff can proceed with a legal action to recover a domain name without regard to the court's personal jurisdiction over the registrant. more»
