Pixelated Semantics

On Typosquatting

An American man has jailed for "typosquatting" - an activity defined as "using names based on popular web searches to trick people into visiting pornographic websites". The 56-year old had registered misspelled versions of Disney trademarks, and others, to fool web users into visiting sites advertising porn and other goods, from which he earned "lucrative" pay-per-click fees. Notably, he was the first to be convicted under a new law, the Orwellian-named "Truth in Domain Names Act". Interesting that mistyped URL's have their own peice of legislation, although strictly he was not "fooling" the users but taking advantage of their lack of typing ability. That a Domain Name Registrar is willing to allocate addresses solely based on their proximity to another 'legitimate' address is an issue that is not discussed.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 11:34 am ::