Legal Research

Google Sued for Placing Ads with Typosquatters

By Simon Fodden

Benjamin Edelman, who teaches marketing in the Harvard School of Business, has initiated a class action against Google on behalf of trademark owners whose marks have been infringed by typosquatters. (See the story on Arstechnica.) Typosquatting is the practice of registering domain names that approximate the names of real companies’ websites in the hope of obtaining advantage from internet users who arrive there by mistyping (e.g. http://goggle.com/). Edelman claims that Google places ads on these fraudulent sites and benefits from revenue generated when a user clicks into the sites by mistake. Given the number of such pseudo-sites, Edelman estimates that Google makes tens of millions of dollars each year from these ads.

Readers interested in learning more about this sort of cyber-squatting might consult the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse, or CADNA (bet you thought of CANADA).

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on October 23, 2008 (boomark / email).