Articles
Eliminating "Typo-squatting"
by Lindsey M. Straus
The Internet has led to an era of electronic commerce in which large-scale marketing activities can be undertaken for modest expense, and geographic boundaries count for very little. Domain names can be registered without any proof of right for a relatively modest fee. Once registered, a domain name can be used to promote the sale of goods and services on a worldwide basis without geographic limitation.
Unfortunately, domain names can also be misused to divert Internet users from a trademark owner's website to the website of a competitor by creating confusion based on common misspellings of a trademark owner's mark, or held hostage to extort money from the trademark owner, a practice now dubbed typo- or cybersquatting. The trademark owner is then forced to incur the expense of suing for damages and injunctive relief in federal court under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999, 15 U.S.C. §1125(d), or seeking a transfer of the disputed domain name (but no damages) through mandatory arbitration under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. (www.icann.org/dndr/udrp/policy.htm).
To minimize or eliminate typo-squatting, a trademark owner should, as part of a comprehensive trademark protection program, engage in defensive domain name registration, i.e. registering all possible misspellings of the domain name associated with its Internet website. For example, the owner of the domain name "HolidayInn.com" would register the domain names "HolidayInn.net," "HolidayInn.biz," "HolladayInn.com," "HolidayIn.com" etc.
