What is Cyber Piracy and Why Should Legal Aid Care?
What is Cyber Piracy and Why Should Legal Aid Care?
If a for-profit company listed themselves as the Legal Aid Society of Your Organization in your city's phone book, you would know how to react and would do so to protect your client community. Cyber Piracy involves similar deceptive practices, but uses the world wide web as its advertising source.
Recent studies by Pew Internet & American Life Project on low-income use of the Internet show that as of 2004, nearly half of low-income households had easy access to the Internet at home or work. (See: Digital Divide Quiz: Test your Knowledge of Client Use of Internet.) With more clients finding legal help online, legal aid programs have an opportunity to reach more people to promote its services or deliver information. Herein lies the threat.
Cyber piracy involves various deceptive practices that companies or individuals engage in to profit from online users. Within the legal aid community, these deceptive practices result in confusion for the public (particularly clients and potential clients) as well as take advantage of the good-will and reputation of legal aid organizations. Without a system to address cyber piracy, legal aid programs risk the chance that the public, especially unsophisticated online users, will not reach legitimate legal aid website and will be confused and possibly extorted on websites posing as legal aid.
Within the legal aid community, cyber piracy is a recent but growing problem. Today over fifty states and territories have launched statewide websites through LSC funding. In addition, hundreds of individual LSC and IOLTA funded programs maintain a program website that utilizes there organization’s name in the URL. These websites spend substantial time and effort providing content for and reaching out to low-income communities. As these websites grow in use and popularity, they become more and more likely target for these practices and the potential for harm to the client population and organizations increases.
There are a variety of practices within the term “cyber piracy” which may include cyber squatting, domain parking, and/or deceptive ad-word use. Each presents a unique challenge for a legal aid program that may lack the time, knowledge and resources to adequately pursue a resolution to these issues.
Legal Aid programs are vulnerable to predatory practices by companies because few programs have their names trademarked. In fact, many programs use generic, descriptive names to describe their program, which may be hard to trademark.
Legal aid programs need to know how cyber piracy is affecting their organization (see NTAP's Research to find out how your program fares online), know the practical steps you can take to protect your organization and clients, and know how to fight cyber piracy.
Understanding the Terms of Cyber Piracy
Understanding the Terms of Cyber Piracy
Cyber Piracy is an umbrella term for online deceptive practices on the web that include:
Cybersquatting
Cybersquatting is defined as registering, trafficking in, or using domain names that are identical or confusingly similar to trademarks with the bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of the trademarks.
Cybersquatters fall into a variety of categories and engage in cybersquatting for a variety of reasons which range from greed, to political activism, to malevolence or innocent mistake.
Sometimes cybersquatters believe they have done nothing wrong because they are using only a variation of a trademark; because they believe that infringing behavior is legal on the Internet, or because they don't acknowledge proprietary rights on the Internet. However, cybersquatters may also hold domain names for ransom, use them for infringing purposes or use them for more nefarious purposes.
A cybersquatter may offer a domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price, an act which some deem to be extortion. He or she may put up derogatory remarks about the person or company the domain is meant to represent in an effort to encourage the subject to buy the domain from them. Often cybersquatters wait for a registered domain name to expire, then register and place derogatory information on the site. Read about what happened to the Center for Arkansas Legal Services.
Domain Parking
Domain parking is similar to cybersquatting, but it is a little more sophisticated. It takes advantage of “type-in” traffic -- people who type in the address based on an assumption of what it will be.
For example, Pine Tree Legal Assistance's website is www.ptla.org, not www.pinetreelegal.org. The latter is a “fake site” which, like many domain parking sites, often displays links with terms substantially similar to that of PTLA’s actual site. Each of the links goes to the website of an advertiser. Each time someone clicks onto one of those advertiser’s links, the domain holder gets a fee. This may be particularly confusing to inexperienced users since often the term on the website and the advertisement are not substantially related. (For example on the www.pinetreelegal.com site the term “child custody” appears, but the link goes to an online dating service.)
Often domain parkers try to sell the URL (much like cyber squatters). Some, however, may make enough income from the advertising click-through that they are uninterested in giving up the URL.
Although ICANN (the Internet Corporation for the Assignment of Names and Numbers) provides an arbitration process through which domain name disputes can be resolved, this process does not afford appropriate remedies in all cases. Unfortunately, the process is also lengthy and expensive and may not present the most appealing option for legal aid programs seeking to retrieve a URL from a domain parker or cyber squatter.
Deceptive Ad-Words
Another aspect of cyber piracy involves false advertising and deceptive trade practices. Each of the major search engines -- Google, Yahoo and MSN -- sell ad-words as a way for companies and organizations to advertise their products via their websites. When a user searches those words, the search engine prominently displays sites that have purchased particular ad-words. Often the title of the link in the search engine includes the words the person searched for such as “Pine Tree Legal Assistance” or “Vermont Legal Aid”.
For sophisticated web users, these “sponsored links” are identifiable. However, for a person new to online searching or a person vunerable to enticement by language promising free or low cost legal service, these advertisements can be extremely confusing – and ultimately, costly if pursued.