Four major domainer firms are being sued for filling (otherwise unused) sites with ads. One other corporation – Google – has also been named in the class action complaint; Google provided the ads.
Golf Club Company Takes A Swing At Google
This case’s lead plaintiff is a company called Vulcan Golf, and while a custom club manufacturer seems out of place next to Google, don’t think that this lawsuit is just someone’s get-rich-quick scheme. Eric Goldman of the Technology & Marketing Law Blog writes, “The plaintiffs’ attorneys did extensive research and provide a lot of detail, so the complaint lacks some of the deficient elements we often see in lawsuits against search engines.”
Yet typosquatting is a tricky field, and Goldman continues, “[T]he lawsuit could be gutted if the judge rules that none of the parties engaged in a trademark use in commerce – an open legal question that has not been resolved in the domainer context. “Further, the lawsuit could effectively fall apart if the judge rejects formation of a class.”
Other onlookers also feel that Vulcan Golf may be barking up the wrong tree (I’d have worked in a golf reference, but I’m pretty unfamiliar with the game – sorry). “[I]t’s hard to see how Google can be blamed for a domain owner registering a typosquatted name, even if Google’s ads appear on the site,” states Techdirt’s Mike Masnick.
In any case, at least this domainer suit will provide some variety to Google’s lawyers – all those YouTube-related complaints were probably becoming a bit of a bore.
