Typo-Cybersquatters – Gotta Love ‘em

// December 20th, 2007 // Blog & Tech Items, Brain Dump

I was reading a post on some blog (“some blog” is the category of blogs that don’t make it into the feed reader), and really, the post was quite good in providing some useful stuff for bloggers (tools, etc.), yet throughout the post it was quite clear that the guy is completely in love with John Chow.

It’s ok to have a favourite blogger, yet to be all over the guy in such a way is both sad and…

The best part, by FAR, of the entire post was the fact that the link to his #1 blogger was COMPLETELY WRONG! HA! Rather than a link to John Chow, the brain disconnected from the fingers and he ended up with Jhon Chow.

So, the typo-squatter, Federico Reggiani Dellaspora (of Spain), will now get quite a bit of traffic to his URL. Seriously, you don’t register jhonchow.com for any other purpose than hoping johnchow.com will sweep into your life and offer you oodles of cash in an attempt to gain the traffic of those who can’t type.

First I’m reminded of the glorious site of FatFingers.com which is a site where you can type what you are searching for on eBay, and it will search the variations of spelling that it may also be listed under because the person posting the item can’t type.. I have found it amusing AND useful at the same time…

Ok, enough about that – really, the issue here is cybersquatting.

Cybersquatting: according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price.

But is it? See, typo-cybersquatting is a bit of a grey area isn’t it? Ebenezer Thevasagayam registered the domain enterprise.ca to which Enterprise Rent-A-Car took issue with. Now, yes, Ebenezer (nice christmas connection, eh?) was indeed squatting and is in fact a well known Canadian cybersquatter who gets his runs through the courts regularly, however, had he registered something like entreprise.ca it really has nothing to do with the car rental company. Sure, it’s similar and at some point SOMEONE is going to end up visiting it, yet does Enterprise Rent-A-Car have a claim to it?

Ebenezer also had cbcnegotiations.ca registered which really only came into play when CBC did some advertising and forgot a small “.” in a critically important part of the URL… See, they intended to use the link cbc.negotiations.ca, but when the advertising went out it ended up as cbcnegotiations.ca nicely driving some serious traffic to Eb’s domain.. $500 later CBC owned their mistake..

The big issue with the enterprise.ca one was that Eb had links to competitor rental companies which is just in bad taste and really just a strong-arm tactic to get someone to pay up… Dare I say, Extortion?

So really, unless you’re going to put up an anti-John Chow page on you jhonchow.com site, aren’t the chances of cashing in pretty slim? When you think about it, if someone is looking for the correct domain, and they end up at the wrong one (because they made the error), won’t it be pretty obvious that something is amiss? To hold out hoping that John will offer you money to capture users who don’t realize the error of their ways (you can hear them now: “I keep going to jhonchow.com but I don’t see his blog…”) is a bit much. I’m not sure I would pay someone for access to the not-so-bright readership…

Hrm, so does that mean the only way you can profit from your typo-domain is to be a complete ass and extort people? Guess so.