Agreeing with the company’s complaints that the domains in question were confusingly similar to Google and that the defendant had no legitimate right to use them, the National Arbitration Forum made the decision in Google’s favor despite the absence of the defendant, Sergey Gridasov of St. Petersburg, Russia.
An associate of Gridasov wrote the arbitrator to say while Gridasov admitted that googkle.com, ghoogle.com and gooigle.com were deliberate attempts to capitalize on Google’s name, he did not know that the sites were leading surfers to malware code.
The malware code, Gridasov’s associate said, was from a third party.
Typosquatting is punishable under the Amber Alert laws, which protect against “false or misleading Internet names,” among other crimes.
In last year’s case of Shields vs. Zuccarini, an adult webmaster named John Zuccarini was sentenced to 30 months of prison for registering misspellings of popular children’s sites, sending children and parents to adult content and casino sites when they wanted to visit Bob the Builder or the Teletubbies online.
Typosquatting protection is increasingly one of the incentives offered by hosting companies. In addition to the standard upsells of different extensions for a domain name, many companies also offer variations on the domain’s spelling that can then be redirected to the correct site.