Aug 23 2006
Cybersquatters Beware, Microsoft Is Coming
I’m sure we’ve all experienced this one. You are trying to get to your favorite web site and, thanks to the slip of a finger, you find yourself somewhere else entirely. Often, the site you are seeing has nothing on it but advertising and your little finger slip may have resulted in a pay-day for some opportunist. Welcome to the world of the Cybersquatter.
Cybersquatters are the type of creatures that hang-out in damp dark places that never see the light. They while-away the hours searching for available domain names that are just slightly off from major web sites (www.yotube.com, www.googl.com, www.mcrosoft.com). Once they identify their pray, they set-up their revenue nets to snare their victims while swapping stories with Spammers about how cleaver they are.
Well, Microsoft has said, enough is enough:
Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday it has filed two lawsuits against so-called “cybersquatters” or “typosquatters” who use the company’s product names to profit illegally from online advertising.
How wide will Microsoft spread their net?
The software giant says the parties violated the 1999 Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, which imposes a fine of $100,000 on a person or entity who purposefully registers domain names that are the same or very similar to established sites or that are clearly meant to profit from their likeness to other sites, Reuters reports.
Microsoft filed legal action against the specific people who registered or tried to register the suspect names, but it is not currently going after the ad services that allow such parties to post their ads, according to Reuters. Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all offer online advertising services in which they act as middlemen for sites seeking to place their ads on other popular websites, Reuters reports.
Granted cybersquatters are simply modern-day carpetbaggers and rank somewhere down with other wiggly creatures, but why would a company with more money than most countries be worried about the little cybersquatter? Is there something more to the story?
Microsoft said it is still unclear who is responsible for policing intellectual property on the Web and it wants information from advertising service providers about the profits these domain registers are making.
‘We’re not 100 percent certain which ad services these pages are using. That’s one of the things we intend to learn through our litigation,’ Microsoft’s Kornblum said.
This reminds me of the standard Microsoft business plan: Attack, discover what opportunities exist, and destroy the competition. By going after the cybersquatters, perhaps Microsoft is really going after Internet marketing. They may be trying to corner the ad space market by destroying the competition. We’ve see it before.
Worse yet, what if Microsoft wants to be the ones who “polices intellectual property” on the Internet. Are we scared yet?
