Potential Legal Issues for Typo Squats?

While researching for some nice domain with potential type-in traffic, I bumped into some typo error domains. Well, we all know that domain investors are using many way to draw traffic to their domains especially parked domain in order to earn cool nice revenue from PPC.

One of the common way is grabbing those typo errors domain names, which traffic would likely to incurred due to people typing in the wrong url address or simply not sure of the correct spelling so they'll type in what they "think" should be.

Looking at this, let's take an example :- yahooo.com (extra "h") which is a parked domain currently (not mine...but I wish is mine). Would it possibly invite legal dispute??

What would the legal dispute be? You can't buy domain with names close to another such as yahoo.com.

That's what I would like to find out further too! For example:-
1. yahooo.com (extra "o") is currently directed to yahoo.com, so I guess they owned it!
2. gooogle.com (extra "o" too) is also directed to google.com.

What about this domain "goooogle.com" ? It is a parked domain currently which I guess is not owned by google.com. Would google.com tries to dispute about it?? We know google disputed about booble.com (in another thread http://www.domainsocial.com/showthread.php?t=69)

Scratching my head...

It is definatly grounds for a court case (or now a domain dispute), and Yahoo or Google could probably win. Of course, their company size and importance is enough to justify them winning the case (alas, this is how it seems to work in the legal world), but I know that is not what you are asking.

The domains sound sufficiently familar to the original mark. This could be considered 'bad faith' if no disclaimer is issued on the site, as it might be deemed that it confuses visitors (yes, they arent always all that intelligent). It could also be considered as trademark dillution.

I know that it dosent really seem fair, and this has drawn a lot of criticism, but in the end, it's the policy which was adopted and so its how it works.

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This seems purposely confusing and taking advantage of that.

I dunno, seems reasonable to me. I can't think of a motive for registering a typo of a big name brand other than to misguide surfers. I know the big fish have a great advantage in terms of resources but this isn't like some little guy like Adsense getting screwed, this is someone who deliberately set out to misdirect not being allowed to do it. Not a lot of skin off anyone's nose if it doesn't pan out.

Nod. I was curious about this too. Personally I'd be worried about a typo site close to the name of a financial institution.

I used to work for a construction company that had the same name as a huge, nationally known construction firm. Thing is, the little guys I worked for had been around for alot longer than the big guys. The big guys had the .com of course, but the little firm had it with a hyphen. They definitely didn't mean to misguide surfers, but they needed a web presence. Since they were both in the same industry, thought, they may have gotten a few contracts that would have went to the large company

There are indeed cases of domain names allegedly infringing trademarks
because they're supposedly typos. Many have actually been resolved thru
an administrative procedure called UDRP (just google it) because it's more
convenient than going thru Court.

Note there's no black or white answer to it. UDRPs, just like court cases,
are fact-intensive.

IANAL, BTW.

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Perhaps the registrar could decide to take the name.