| About Typosquatting | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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How did Alf Temme wind up with all that "bad press" on Google relating to litigation for typo domain names? The following is not a complete list of the domain related litigation I got involved in through my desire to establish a domain registration consulting business. The majority of companies that wanted to get the domain names that I had registered for the below described domain registration consulting service, wrote simple notification demand letters and they received the requested domains immediately from me. There were some that went for WIPO arbitration and at first I tried to explain to some of the arbitrators why I had registered the names that were in dispute to get them to understand that they were not registered with bad faith intentions, and instead for a very good beneficial purpose in mind. But none of the explanations were ever correctly presented in the writing of the arbitration lawyers and the conclusions they drew. Lawyers do not think in positive terms when they want to do legal battle. That of course gave me alot of bad press on the search engines. As you will read the below, you may find out that I am a totally different person than what is reflected in the information from Google and other searches. Then there were a number of companies that did not bother with notification/demand letters and jumped directly to arbitration. I believe this primarily happens because lawyers that are tasked with obtaining the domain names are better off with complicating matters so that they create a lot of billing hours. Then the newest trend is to immediately jump into a lawsuit without prior notification and then offer to settle for a totally unreasonable amount of damages plus legal fees. The proposed amount to settle is to project true expectations of plaintiff lawyers, The proposed settlement amounts are so outrageous that no defendant is in a position to settle and now is forced into defend against the suit that will facilitate the lawyers to milk as many billing hours as possible out of the suit by complicating things as much as possible. All these typo domain related suits are guaranteed to be won because they are all based upon the ACPA (Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act) which does not protect the consumers at all and only gives over-the-top damage awards to plaintiffs of $100,000 punitive damages for every domain name involved. I had a fairly good idea, but a bit naive I, Alf Temme, had an idea to create a business out of being a domain registration consulting firm (Domain name consolidation service).advising large corporations on what kind of domains these businesses should need to register to make certain that they would not have to make expensive and time consuming efforts years later to obtain those domain names from others that by then could have registered those domains in faraway countries where they would be difficult to obtain. It seemed a very practical idea to save all these large corporations a lot of money and grief later. An ounce of prevention Today there are many businesses , mostly law offices, that provide the far more costly services of filing lawsuits to get the names those large companies should have registered many years ago via the type of preventive domain consulting service I wanted to provide years ago. It is a similar idea of doing illness preventing exercise rather than allowing illness to develop first and having to spend far more money and time to restore health. A major flaw Unfortunately there was a major flaw in my business model in that the Federal Government had once more interfered with private enterprise by passing a law that gave special previleges to special interests with two laws. The two laws were well meant, I am sure, to give special protection to large businesses to protect their intellectual property such as trademarks and tradenames. The two laws are: 1. The Lanham act was passed in 1946 and explained in detail in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanham_Act 2. The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). In detail explained by Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticybersquatting_Consumer_Protection_Act Both of these laws make it illegal for anyone in the United States to register domain names that have any similarity with, or are mistypes of, domains that are owned by companies that have some intellectual property rights to the names registered by others. There is a possibility that both these laws are in conflict with the Constitution, but who cares, they were passed into law and they were well paid for by the large monopoly special interests. In addition these laws have created a bonanza for the legal industry by having created a huge new business opportunity for law offices for a lot of work that could have been easily prevented if corporations would have practiced prevention by registering the domain names years earlier when Alf Temme tried to create a service in the form of a domain registration consulting service that the legal departments, of the companies that Alf Temme contacted, ehowed no interest in. First steps My idea for a preventive maintenance domain consulting business was started by me by making large lists of domain names that I felt should be registered and owned by these large corporations that I was going to propose the consulting service to. In soliciting these companies for signing up for the pro-active domain consulting service I wanted to present them with about half the list of names that I was recommending that they should register. I wanted to give them an idea of what the value of this service might be for these corporations. Most of these large and mid-sized companies had no person on staff that had any reasonable clue about the importance of domain names. So it was immediately a very time consuming and labor intensive effort to educate people about the importance of domain names and I never got to talk to the right people, the ones in marketing and advertising. I always got turned over to the people that dealt with intellectual property. Yes, that's right, their legal departments. A big problem Problem was that as soon as these companies had been made aware of the importance of domains and they had been shown a large number of the names by me, they would get busy themselves and start registeing all the names that I had given them and they would not sign up for my proposed consulting service. So I had to decide to register about half of the domains that I was going to recommend. That way I had more control of the service I was offering. But unfortunately that required the registration of domains that were subject to both of the above mentioned laws that cover the intellectual property aspects of such domains. In effect these two laws prohibited the creation of a business that would prevent a lot more costly litigation in years to come. As such these laws disallowed such prevention to be promoted and practiced. Bad for the economy as a whole. It was illegal to register those domains So, registering those domains was in violation of these 2 laws that the monopoly special interests had been lobbying for and succeeded to get passed by Congress. The Lanham Act is much older and existed already before the Internet came along. That law was modified a few times to strengthen the power of the special interests. The much more powerful Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) was obtained by the large monopoly special interests during the Clinton administration. That ACPA law certainly gives a whole new meaning to absolute power. After registering many domains After having registered a lot of domains to be able to protect my domain consulting service (domain consolidation service), I now made my first offering of my proposed domain consulting service with having a protective number of domains registered myself that I then would turn over as a package deal with the concurrent signing of the consulting service contract. My hope was that the marketing and advertising departments of the companies I would be contacting would see the value of the service and sign on to it. That first offering was to Alaska Airlines for which I had registered a fair number of domains. They included also typo domains and some domains like FLYTOBAJA.com, FLYTOALASKA.com, FLYTOACAPULCO.com and some .net and .org domains that should have been registered by Alaska Airlines when they registered the .com domains. The consulting service offering was not heard by the Alaska Airlines marketing department. It was turned over to their legal department that deals with intellectual property issues. The making of the large list of domains that I had prepared for presentation to Alaska Airlines constituted actually intellectual creative work product of mine and it was immediately stolen by the legal department and registered by Alaska Airlines. They could easily do that because most of these domains were registered by me in violation of the two laws and Alaska Airlines had trademark and intelligent property rights in most of them. And guess what, that resulted in my first arbitration case against me. No consulting service sign-up. So I scratched it up to inexperience in matters of domains by the large corporations. I still own those FlyToAlaska.com amd other FlyTo domains because the Alaska Airlines could not lay claim to those. I was totally mistaken I was wrong in thinking that it was lack of understanding that these corporations did not sign up to my domain consulting service. It was as a result of the nature of lawyers that seem to think predominantly in terms of wanting to do legal battle whenever they can, specially when they have absolute power on their side by virtue of the two affore mentioned laws. The lawyers for Alaska Airlines made of course certain that they published their victory over me on the Internet and twisted the facts such that it placed me in a particularly unfavorable light. It is standard procedure for trial lawyers, it is their official job not to present objective truth because that decreases their chancess of winning cases. Presenting half truths, twisted thruths and outright inaccuracies is standard procedure in allegations made. Stubborn persistance is rarely a wise thing Persisting for awhile with not giving up on the idea of this domain registration consulting service, I ran into several more of these arbitration cases. The next ICANN arbitration case was for Air France in 2004 for which I had registered a number of typo domains back in 1999 and such names as flytoparis.com and others. I had by then given up most hope that the domain registration consulting service had any chance with the two affore mentioned laws in place and the additional ICANN rules that also prohibit the registration of certain types of domains. So I only made a halfhearted and feeble attempt to explain my intentions with the registtrations of the domains for the purpose of the domain registration consulting service. None of those explanations were ever mentioned in the draft of the final decision by the arbitrators. They just wrote their opinions in their arbitration reports and the opinions of the plaintiffs in the arbitration procedures. Nothing of my explanations I sent them in writing was ever presented in their reports and they resorted even to deliberate falsehoods, such as they wrote that I demanded substantial compensation for the domain names, intimating that I wanted to sell them. Nothing of the sort. After that Air France arbitration I finally realized that there was no future hope for my domain registration consulting service because companies and people in general are not interested in any form of preventive measures, not in business matters and not in their private lives (an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure). These companies would rather pay for a pound of cure to retrieve the domains they could have simply registered a few years earlier with an ounce of prevention. Similarly to letting their health deteriorate by not doing prevention such as eating right and exercising at less than 10% of the cost of treating illness. Why I did not hide my contact information Many people are wondering whether I am stupid for not hiding my contact information or why I did not register the domains in offshore jurisdictions where they would be out of reach or at least more difficult to file complaints against. The reason is that I had never intended bad faith use with the typo domains because I only wanted to create a domain registration consulting service that was to be a benefit to the companies whose domains I had registered and as such it would have been a benefit for the economy as a whole. Hiding contact information or offshoring the domains would be a sure indication that the individuals that are doing domain registrations in that way had bad faith use of the domains in mind which I never had. Why I did not move the domains to an offshore jurisdiction out of reach Again, I never had bad faith use of the domains in mind and I actually wanted the companies to easily find my contact information so they could ask me for the domains at any time they would become interested in the domains so that I could simply turn them over to them. Not renewing them and dropping them would have been very bad for the companies that would want the domains, because those domains would now be in the hands of people that indeed had bad faith intentions with them. I never ever offered the typo domains or any other domains for sale. When companies demanded the domains they wanted to have I simply turned them over. A purely altruistic act on my part. I know that it is hard to believe that there are people like that around. People like I seem to be are generally seen as idiaots by the lawyers that intend to file suit against them. Generally, no good deed goes unpunished. Why did I not simply cut the typo domains loose and be done with them? As soon as I would have cut the typo domains loose they would have been picked up by the kind of offshore click aggregating domainers that really have bad faith purposes in mind and now it would be quite difficult and costly for the corporations to retrieve the domain names they wanted to have. I indeed even tried to contact some of the larger companies to get them to take their domains but most of these companies are impossible to get to the right people. It is similar to wanting to talk to members of Congress. It is near impossible to get to the right people. Try Microsoft for example. If you want to get to the people that might be in charge of accepting domain names that Microsoft is interested in, you first look up the "whois" information for one of their domain names, say http://www.msn.com/. You now get the phone number that is listed as the phone for Admin and Tech 1-425-882-8080. You wind up in the Phillippines talking to someone who does not even know what a domain name is. Impossible to turn over domain names. So instead of cutting the domains loose and feed them to those who will register them with bad faith intent. So as a totally altruistic act I kept incurring the expense for renewing the names until the companies would contact me. But apparently, as noted above, no good deed goes unpunished , , , Absolute power corrupts absolutely Now came a set of brand new services on the scene that took full advantage of the ACPA in a very vicious manner. There are some very creative law offices that avail themselves of a service such as http://www.markmonitor.com/ a service that specializes on feeding law offices information on possible domain registrations that might be infringing on the intellectual property rights of large corporations. These law offices will now offer to retrieve these infringing domains for free (on contingency) and will live on the damage awards that they might be awarded by the Courts. The corporations then get their domain names for free and the law offices get awarded cost of suit plus possible punitive damages. In some cases an inside counsel inside the corporation on whose behalf the suit is filed gets to share in the spoils and occasionally the corporations gets to share in the spoils as well. As mentioned before, absolute power through the ACPA does often corrupt absolutely. Dell v. Temme was next And so it is that I got a first lawsuit filed against me by Dell Computer. I had also registered a number of computer related domains such as bestcomputeranimation.com and bestcomputergraphics.com and several others and 7 typo domains which I had attempted to turn over to Dell after it became increasingly evident that these bounty hunting lawyers were becoming a real threat. I was successfull with a number of smaller companies to turn over their typo domains to them, because they were easy to contact. Some of them were not interested even to take the typo domains over because it was too trivial to them and they did not wish to spend the yearly renewal fee on them. I advised against letting them expire but I then let them expire with the permission of these smaller companies. Did I offer any of these domains for sale? Absolutely not. So the Dell domain suit against me was an entirely new development and it should have shown me that there are a lot of very viscious lawyers out there operating like highway men from ages past. That Dell case was a very strange one with the on contingency lawfirm being from Chicago and having no office anwhre near Dell's headquarters in Texas. They filed suit in Austin, Texas, well outside my ability to handle the defense as a Pro-Per defendant. In this Dell case I actually did receive some income from the domain names. The details of that lawsuit can be read here: http://www.domainnamesquatting.com/ March 2009, American Automobile Association (AAA) An example of how the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) is convaying so much power to Plaintiff litigants that leads to corruption. I had registered a large number (100) of generic domain generic words preceded by AAA, meaning high quality in a product or service. The not for profit AAA Automobile Club filed suit for a large number of these domains on the basis that they started with the 3 letters A for which they had trademark rights and that this would cause confusion. The suit had no basis because the Automobile Club had no trademark rights to any of the domains that started with AAA and were followed by a generic word. They filed the suit in Central Florida and defending against it would have amounted to a minimum of $50,000 plus an enormous amount of time. So I rolled over and gave them the domain names that they had no legitimate right to. This is the reality that large corporation scan file suits that small individuals do not have the funds for to defend against. What are we missing here that Oliver Wendell Holmes understood? According to famous past Supreme Court Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes: A trademark does not confer a right to prohibit the use of the word or words . . . [by others] . . . . A trademark only gives the right to prohibit the use of it so far as to protect the owner’s goodwill against the sale of another’s product [or service] as his.” This means that mis-typed domains are OK to be used to sell a service or a product and the ownership of such mis-typed domains constitutes use of another's name or trademark to sell one's own product of a different name. Oliver Wendell Holmes understood the Constitution but today's legislators, Courts and large monopolistic special interests and their lawyers do not give a hoot about the Constitution. They trample on it and twist it to their benefit without regard to the rights of others that lose in the process when they mold the Constitution into their new designs. The Constitution and laws are not used by them to interpret what is right or wrong, but instead what is to their own maximum advantage and profit. A new record in domain litigation was recently established by Microsoft I had registered 24 Microsoft typo domains for the same purpose of the ill fated domain registration consulting service explained above. Without sending me a demand letter first, Microsoft filed suit demanding the 24 domains and up to $2,400,000 plus legal costs in damages. Then simultaneously I received a "settlement proposal letter" that offered to settle the suit for $500,000. Microsoft's inhouse counsel Tim Cranton is in charge of pursuing and suing all internet related criminals at which he is doing a brilliant job, as is evident from the many victories he has scored as published on Google. Tim Cranton has identified me, Alf Temme as a particularly egregius cyber criminal that he wanted to make an example of to dissuade other typo squatters from practicing their crimes of registering typo domains. I think that he took the right approach based upon all the negative information that is published on Google about me in relation to typosquatting. I am certainly not the "bad faith" typo domain registrant as portrayed The reality is that I am not the kind of person that is being portrayed by all those Google published articles about me in relation to domain typo matters. If I were that kind of person, I certainly would not have registered all those domains with my exactly correct contact information. I did not register them with the very popular "privacy" registration option and I did not register them in some offshore jurisdiction (Korea, Bermuda, Bahamas, and many other such locations) where they are more difficult to sue or pursue by lawyers in the United States and where they are subject to the draconian punitive damage awards of the ACPA (Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act). So Tim Cranton must have concluded that I must be a complete idiot for not availing myself of all these TypoSquatting facilitations. The truth is that most other people will decide that I must be an idiot because they cannot conceive of the possibility that I might just be an exception to the exceedingly mean and dishonest society that we have created in the past 40 years where corruption and dishonesty is seen as clever and smart and where corruption runs rampant in high office and top management of businesses. Meanwhile I turn out to be an individual that practices alot of altruism in that I create ideas to improve government and the economy and I will never make any money with those ideas, but if I could get broad support for them they would end the recession in record time and boost the economy to new record levels. Two of the more urgent projects of mine are http://www.endingtherecession.com/ (will end the recession in record time and not let it go on until 2015 such as it will if we leave it in the hands of our leaders in Washington DC) and http://www.automatictax.com/ (a brilliant new tax system that requires no accounting, no filing of taxes and no audits). I mentioned to SeattlePI.com reporter Nick Eaton that I immediately turn over any typo domains that are requested by legitimate holders of underlying trademark rights. Tim Cranton poo-pooed that as highly unlikely and that he did not write a demand letter before filing suit because he feared that I would immediately make the domains disappear out of his easy reach. As we can see, he had concluded that I am an idiot. Meanwhile I have indeed turned over 26 typo domains to Microsoft (I found two more of them in my files that could be interpreted as typo domains). You can check them out on Who.is and see that they are all registered to Microsoft and you can also look them up in your browser and see that they are all redirected by an automatic Microsoft redirection procedure to Bing.com . So that leaves the $500,000 to $2,400,000 that Microsoft would like to bankrupt me with and close the two small businesses I have operated for many years and add 12 employees of mine to the unemployment statistics. The http://www.sauna.com/ business has 4 employees and has built saunas for over 47 years and the other http://www.fastworkout.com/ has 8 employees (had 26 employees before this recession hit that can be ended in record time with my http://www.endingtherecession.com/ ). Following is the lisst of 26 domains I did turn over to Microsoft on May 10, 2010. It took me awhile to figure out how to do it:
One of the stated objectives of the ACPA One of the stated objectives of the Anticibersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) is to protect the consumers from being redirected from the website they intended to visit, to another website that they did not want to go to because it might create confusion and it is annoiing. In my case of redirecting the mistyped domains to the website that aims to sell the ROM machine of my manufacture, Microsoft correctly alleges in their lawsuit that I created such confusion and annoyance for the people that intended to go to http://www.hotmail.com/ and wound up at http://www.fastworkout.com/ . Ironically Microsoft creates the identical confusion with a large number of typo domains of Hotmail that are owned and controlled by Microsoft by diverting the traffic of people that intended to go to http://www.hotmail.com/ to www.Bing.com , equally annoying and confusing to the users that intended to go to http://www.hotmail.com/ and that is being done at about 5 times the volume as what was done by me. Should that be an excuse for me to claim innocense? Of course not, because I am not to stand in judgement of what Microsoft wants to do with the typo domains they own. It is none of my business. What I hope though is that Microsoft will take into consideration the fact that on the issue of protecting the consumer from "confusion" and annoyment they are equally guilty and that it is akin to the pot calling the kettle black. Microsoft could help In total I hope that Microsoft will put its considerable political power behind my http://www.endingtherecession.com/ emergency legislation proposal that will pull the economy out of recession in record time. Our leaders in Washingto DC are totally clueless on matters of economics and will keep us in recession until at least 2015 if they keep doing what they are doing, which is little to nothing. For Microsoft to concentrate on bankrupting me and my two small companies that employ 12 people will not help the economy at all by putting another 12 people on unemployment and reducing American manufacturing even more. So I would hope that Microsoft will consider dropping their demand for punitive damages. The 24 asked for domain names are already in Microsoft's posession since May 10, 2010 . In fact there are 26 domains that I gave to Microsoft. I found another 2 domains in my files that Microsoft did not make a request for. An irony Another irony is that all the large search engines including Microsoft's www.Bing.com are making millions selling their per click ads, are making full use of the trademark rights of thousands of companies. Google has been sued for infringing on all these trademark rights of thousands of companies but the Court took the viewpoint of "the lesser evil" and Google prevailed. It would have made searchengines financially impossible and that would make them disappear to a great disadvantage to all of society. |
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