| Defending the Typosquatter |
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| Written by Bret Fausett | |
| Friday, 27 July 2007 | |
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When I was in college, I took a 'Philosophy of the Law' class, taught by famous libertarian John Hospers, which included as an assigned text "Defending the Undefendable." (Amazon: Defending the Undefendable: The pimp, prostitute, scab, slumlord, libeler, moneylender and other scapegoats in the rogue's gallery of American society If the book had been written today, it might have included a chapter on typosquatters. Before you read any further, I should tell you that I have not seen any good argument to defend typosquatting against a claim brought by someone claiming trademark rights in a word or phrase. If you were hoping to find some way to defend the practice of typosquatting in a UDRP or an ACPA proceeding, you can stop reading now. You won't find anything useful here. This piece is about the court of public opinion. The fact that typosquatting is illegal doesn't necessarily mean it's not working out for the mutual commercial benefit of both the brand owner and the typosquatter. Let me explain. Remember on Tuesday when I wrote about how the expiring name auction houses were touting the imminent availability of "wolmart.com"? That's as good an example of a typosquat as we're going to get, so let's look at that name. Shortly after it expired -- "shortly" as in a slice of a sliver of a millisecond after it expired -- wolmart.com was scooped up by a UK-based registrar and registered to a man in Brooklyn, New York. After it was registered, it was promptly parked and monetized at Sedo. Sedo, as readers will know, is paid by advertisers to run their ads on Sedo's network of parked pages. One of the advertisers in the Sedo network is Walmart, which now has the top ad placement on Wolmart.com.  Have you put the pieces together yet? Yes, that's right. Walmart is paying to run ads on Wolmart. If you think that Wolmart has duped Walmart into advertising on a typo site...or that Walmart has been clever enough to advertise on Wolmart to gain traffic from the typo...it easily may be the case that both theories are wrong and neither the registrant nor the advertiser have any clue of the other's existence. These days, the people buying expiring domain names don't buy names as much as they buy traffic. If a registrant knows that wolmart.com is getting a lot of traffic and is available for a reasonable price, he'll buy it, whether the name is wolmart.com or 76tya7d4rq.com. The name matters less than the traffic. After the name is registered, it's parked at Sedo, which use its association engine to find words and phrases that might possibly be related to "wolmart," and serves up related ads. One of those ads is by Walmart. And what is Walmart getting for its advertising dollars? An audience of people looking for Walmart.com. These two were made for each other and Sedo has brought them together. What could be more perfect? It's a nice, mutually beneficial commercial arrangement, and it will continue to be so....until Walmart figures out that it's paying more to place the ads through Sedo than it would to register the name "wolmart.com" for its own account. Next week I catch up on some unrelated pieces of the domain name industry, and I have another themed piece, on domainer "worst practices" rolling out the week of August 6th. Stay tuned.
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Or Close Monetization 
Sedo 
WalMart 
typosquatting 
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| Last Updated ( Saturday, 28 July 2007 ) |
.) It's a book that makes good, logical (and libertarian) arguments about why we shouldn't punish some of the 'undefendable' members of our society, neither in courts of law nor in the court of public opinion. 
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