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Typosquatting and the Duty to Police Infringing Trademarks: Initial Interest Confusion and 'Post-Initial Confusion'
You are the owner of KibbleSoft, the widely used fuzzy-logic retail management software package for pet food distributors. Understanding the value of the KibbleSoft brand, you have registered the trademark and carefully policed against infringers for a number of years. And having early grasped the importance of the Internet for promoting your brand, you were also a step ahead of the cybersquatters and acquired the kibblesoft.com domain in 1996. Much of your business now runs through your heavy-trafficked Web site at www.kibblesoft.com.
Recently, however, your trademark attorneys have brought a new problem to your attention: typosquatters. Parties unrelated to KibbleSoft LLC have registered a number of variants of your domain name, including among many others wwwkibblesoft.com, kibbelsoft.com, kbblesoft.com, and kibblseoft.com. The owners of these domains seek to profit, in one manner or another, from either common typographical errors or misspellings of the kibblesoft.com domain name.
What's in it for them? The owner of wwwkibblesoft.com is a competitor who forwards traffic to a Web page promoting its own pet food distribution software, under its own brand. The kbblesoft.com typosite and most of the others, however, are not operated by competitors. Rather, these Web pages are calculated to bring the careless keyboarder to “parked” domain pages that display a collection of links to Web sites selling a range of products, mostly relating to the pet business or to pet food. The owners of these domains get a small payment every time someone clicks on one of the links found at these pages.
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