Intellectual Property Law

A Typosquatter Tells All, and Defends His Actions

By Michael Atkins

Alf Temme, a self-confessed typosquatter and defendant in a lawsuit Microsoft brought discussed here and here, went public again last week with a guest post in the Seattle P-I titled, “Why I typosquatted and why it should be legal.”

In it, he discusses his run-ins with Alaska Airlines, Air France, Dell, and Microsoft, and why the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act makes for bad public policy.

Here’s some of why Mr. Temme believes he’s misunderstood:

“After the Dell disaster, I would have been quite justified to dump all the typo domains I was saving for their rightful claimants, but that would have done exactly what I wanted to prevent with my ill-fated domain-registration consulting service. I didn’t want malicious typosquatters to snatch them up.

“I had registered 24 Microsoft typo domains during my consulting experiment. Without sending me a demand letter first, Microsoft filed suit in March, demanding the 24 domains and up to $2.4 million – plus legal costs – in damages. Simultaneously, I received an offer from Microsoft to settle the case for $500,000.

“Tim Cranton, a Microsoft associate general counsel, is in charge of pursuing and suing all Internet-related criminals. He is doing a brilliant job, as is evident from the many victories of his I found on Google. Cranton identified me, Alf Temme, as a particularly egregious cyber criminal, telling seattlepi.com he wanted to make an example of me to dissuade others from typosquatting. Based on all the negative information you can find about me on Google, I think he took the right approach.

“The reality is, I am not the kind of person portrayed by all those Google results. If I were that kind of person, I certainly would not have registered all those domains with my correct contact information. I did not register them with the popular “private” registration option and I did not register them in some offshore jurisdiction like Korea, Bermuda or the Bahamas.

“So Tim Cranton must have concluded that I must be a complete idiot of a typosquatter for not taking these precautions. Most other people will decide 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 we have created in the past 40 years.”

Full post as published by Seattle Trademark Lawyer on July 07, 2010 (boomark / email).