Typosquatting, domain dropping, what do you think?

[Pentarix]

I found this article here:

Of the 30 million dot-com names registered worldwide last month, more than 90 percent were dropped, according to domain name registrar GoDaddy.com. As a whole, the Internet has 54 million active .com and .net addresses, according to VeriSign.

Jackson said he has bought 6,600 domains and uses several ad services to earn revenue on them. "I know quite a few guys making over a million dollars a year from advertising on their domains," he said. "It's like a 24-hour money-printing machine."

What do you think of this practise?

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Apart from being illegal, good luck to them

 

[Pentarix]

That's what I don't understand, I'm not seeing anywhere that it's illegal, more that it's just annoying and I hate ending up on those sites when I'm searching for something relevant.

 

[temi]

Some how I do not believe this making million dollars blah blah blah from people getting to a site they do not want to go and then seeing adverts and clicking on it. I really do not see anything illegal about it either, if a domain name is available, its not a trademark of someone or the other, then any one can register it in my opinion.

 

[PrivateInvestigator]

it does annoy me when you see a domain you wanted with nothing more than a holding page full of adsense ads and PPC search engines.

 

[Pentarix]

There must be literally millions of those sites out there, I know someone is making a fortune off of it. They suck and it's frustrating to be surfing for something and to come across one of these sites. I don't understand why a company like Google would allow someone to place ads on a site like that in the first place, there's no content to begin with.

I've heard of this domain name thing before, where you can put money into VeriSign, register a bunch of domains and dump them within 6 days. People are doing this to make some shady money and as far as I know it's not illegal but it sure is annoying.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

What is illegal?
OK there is a law called passing off, and another called trademarking. A prime example is google. Probably one of the worlds best known brands.

So if I register the domain name gooogle.com, who is likely to visit it? People looking for google.com that's who. Thankfully in this case, Google took back the domain as it was illegally being used. Trademark protection offers protection not ONLY to the brand name, but ANYTHING that infiringes the trademark, including typos, and colours shapes etc .

This is what I meant by it being illegal.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

<added> after actually reading the article LOL . It clearly mentions on there about trademark infringment.