Typosquatting

Typosquatting seems like a new trend, although it is something that has been going on for years. A great deal of media attention has been paid to typosquatting recently, one reason being that Relatieplanet has been suffering from this method of stealing customers. Other companies such as Air France and eBay were already uncomfortably familiar with the damaging consequences.

Typosquatting is registering particular domain names which have no purpose other than to pick up traffic from visitors who type in these domain names by accident. The visitors then end up at a different website than the one they were looking for. In the case of Relatieplanet, the names relatiplanet.nl, relatieplenet.nl and relatieplaneet.nl were all registered by a competing dating service provider. So visitors who are in a hurry in their search for a partner and forget to type the middle letter e would end up on the competitor's site.

It would seem that the competitor dating service was attempting to obtain extra visitors in this way because Relatieplanet is the market leader in the field of Internet dating, with some 800,000 members and 1.2 million unique visitors every month.

Since typosquatting can be seen as a kind of web-based violation of trademark rights, de Merkplaats – a specialist in this area – has been brought in. That would seem to be a logical step, given that de Merkplaats also looks after the Relatieplanet trademark. Their intention was that Michiel Ellens from Teurlings & Ellens lawyers in Amsterdam would help Relatieplanet with the injunction. However, the competitor decided to make the best of a bad job before it got that far and removed the domain names from the net.

Given the results of previous typosquatting cases, such as arifrance.com and e-bay.nl, that would appear to have been a wise move. In the latter case, the design bureau JustDesign was fined € 7000 by WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva) for registering the domain name e-bay.nl.

For more information, please visit www.relatieplanet.nl