All of world's big firms hit by typosquatting

----Squatting? Sounds kinda kinky doesn't it?

The world's 500 biggest companies have all fallen victim to typosquatting. OUT-LAW research has found that the fast-growing trend of making ad money from web domains similar to famous brands affects all the world's biggest firms.

Typosquatting is the profiting, through adverts, from websites whose addresses are very close to famous brand names. A typical site could be microsift.com. When visitors go to a typosquatter's site they see adverts which, when displayed, pay the site operator a small fee.

Though the money earned by each advert is often only a few dollar cents, the volume of traffic and the number of domains held by professional typosquatters means that some are earning millions of dollars a year.

OUT-LAW.COM analysed web sites relating to brand names held by the Fortune Global 500 biggest companies and the FTSE 100 biggest companies on the London Stock Exchange and found that every one of them had a brand which had fallen victim to typosquatting. The results are published today in the OUT-LAW Magazine and in weekly technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio.

Many of the sites violate trade mark law because they involve the business use of a name that is very similar to a trade marked term.

"If you have a trade mark registration or common law rights and someone is trading under a name which is similar to the name you've got rights in, then providing they're trading in a similar area then yes it would be trade mark infringement," said Lee Curtis, a trade mark specialist with Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/29/biggest_companies_typosquatted/