John Zuccarini and his company Cupcake Patrol were sued by Electronics Boutique under US cybersquatting legislation that does not exist in Europe.
Cybersquatting is normally taken to mean the bad faith registration and use of a domain name. In the UK, an aggrieved trade mark owner in these circumstances can bring a case before national courts, relying on trade mark law and a legal wrong known as passing-off. Alternatively, cases can be taken to a panel of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).
In the US, aggrieved parties have the additional choice of bringing a case under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999 which provides for the remedy of damages up to $100,000 for each offending domain name. For any action under the Act it must shown that there was “deliberate, bad-faith and abusive registration of internet domain names in violation of the rights of trade mark owners”.
Mr Zuccarini registered five domain names that were misspellings of names used by Electronics Boutique, such as eletronicsboutique.com. This type of cybersquatting is also known as typosquatting because it relies on a web user to make a “typo” when entering an address in his or her browser.
Accidental visitors to Mr Zuccarini were, in the Judge’s words, “mousetrapped in a barrage of advertising windows, featuring a variety of products, including credit cards, internet answering machines, games and music. …Sometimes, after wading through as many as 15 windows, the internet user could gain access to EB’s web site.” Mr Zuccarini earned between 10 and 25 cents from advertisers for every click through an advert. US District Judge Berle M. Schiller of Pennsylvania found that John Zuccarini’s typosquatting business earned him annual advertising revenues of up to $1 million.
Judge Schiller took the view that Mr Zuccarini should pay the maximum damages under the Act because he had registered the names after other courts had passed orders to stop his practice in connection with a number of other companies. Accordingly, he was ordered to pay damages of $100,000 in respect of each of the five names he registered in the present case.