Typosquatting is the profiting, through adverts, from websites
whose addresses are very close to famous brand names. A typical
site could be microsift.com. When visitors go to a typosquatter's
site they see adverts which, when displayed, pay the site operator
a small fee.
Though the money earned by each advert is often only a few
dollar cents, the volume of traffic and the number of domains held
by professional typosquatters means that some are earning millions
of dollars a year.
OUT-LAW.COM analysed web sites relating to brand names held by
the Fortune Global 500 biggest companies and the FTSE 100 biggest
companies on the London Stock Exchange and found that every one of
them had a brand which had fallen victim to typosquatting. The
results are published today in the OUT-LAW Magazine and in weekly
technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio.
Many of the sites violate trade mark law because they involve
the business use of a name that is very similar to a trade marked
term.
"If you have a trade mark registration or common law rights and
someone is trading under a name which is similar to the name you've
got rights in, then providing they're trading in a similar area
then yes it would be trade mark infringement," said Lee Curtis, a
trade mark specialist with Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind
OUT-LAW.
"If you had a typosquatter operating a website via a domain name
that was one or two letters different to the trade mark owner's
site and was obtaining advertising revenue that way on the back of
that domain, then you could argue that they were using the brand in
the course of trade. They'd then have a reasonable case of trade
mark infringement and passing off," said Curtis.
Brand owners argue that their investment in building up
familiarity with famous names is undermined by typosquatting.
The practice is relatively new, and has grown because the cost
of owning a domain name has fallen to just $6 a year and internet
traffic has grown exponentially. “It used to be that trade mark
infringement was relatively unusual. Rarely would another company
deliberately set out to copy another brand," said John MacKenzie,
and intellectual property expert at Pinsent Masons.
"Now there are thousands of incidents, each using a very
deliberate and carefully calculated approach. The solution is
to think like the typosquatters. Lawyers need to adopt
technology to automate their processes, and then hit them where it
hurts – in the pocket.”
Christopher Bolinger is corporate counsel for trade marks for
Viagra owner Pfizer and a member of the cybersquatting committee of
the Intellectual Property Owners' Association (IPO). He said: "I
think any confusingly similar variant of your brand in a domain
name is infringement that dilutes your brand and ultimately left
unchecked undermines revenue and undermines your brand equity."
"It weakens your brand.I think it's fair to say that damage to
brands through domain name abuse has got to be in the millions of
dollars if not billions of dollars," said Bolinger.
A common victim of typosquatting is Microsoft. It says that more
than 2,000 domain names containing Microsoft trade mark terms are
registered every day by other people. It believes 75% of those are
owned by professional domain name holders, and that 25% of all
Microsoft trade mark-related domains are held by cyber
squatters.
