Moral Dilemma

[Chris.C]

OK so I'm having an "evil thoughts Friday" and I just want to float a concept...

This is not something I've acted on as yet, but just wanted to get some legal/moral feedback on the idea.

OK I have a client that gets about 100 - 200 direct visitors to their site a month. Which got me thinking I suspect most other players in this industry also get quite a few type in's a month as well.

So let's say there are 300 participants in this industry and only 20 of these have trademarked their business names, and the majority of these businesses have only registered their .com.au domains (ie they don't own their .com domains) but I suspect there would be quite a few people that mistype the domains into their browsers and type in .com instead.

So on a legal and ethical scale of 1 to 10 how bad would it be to go register the .com business names and then redirect the misspelt type in traffic to some sort of independent landing page?

 

[ScottNugent]

Registering of misspellings of business names is wrong and should be wiped out in my honest opinion. Registering misspellings of keywords is 100% legitimate though in my opinion.

Even though they aren't trademarked, they ARE copyrighted (every bit of intellectual property is automatically) names and hence you're trading off someone else's intellectual property, reputation, and potential business (obviously that's the aim of marketing but this is too "dark" for my liking).

Just my 2 cents

 

[Shane]

I'd rate it a 10. Don't go down that path...

 

[Ashman]

I think you should do whatever keeps your shareholders happy and is within the law.

 

[Cooper Mills DomainLawyer]

I'd rate it a 10. Don't go down that path...

I agree with Shane. Even though a party doesn't have a trade mark it doesn't mean that they dont have rights - it could even back fire commercially and cause reputational damage within the industry for your client.

 

[Billy01]

It Doesn't mean they Do have the rights either .........

You your better judgement

 

[findtim]

morally it can back fire, logistically a waste of money and time.

keyword misspellings ahhhh, todays newspaper... tomorrows fish and chip wrapper.

spend your time on ORIGINAL CONTENT CREATION.

tim