NTAP Research: The Impact of Cyber Piracy on Legal Aid Programs

In 2006 and 2007, NTAP has partnered with PTLA to examine the continuing impact of Cyber Piracy practices on legal aid programs. Our research focused on investigating the prevalence of cybersquatting and on deceptive advertising in the wake of the April 2006 LegalMatch settlement.

We found that cybersquatting and deceptive advertising continue to be a problem:

• 42% of LSC funded programs have a cybersquatter -- that is, someone who maliciously uses a variation of a legal aid program's website address.
• 28% of the 238 legal aid programs whose names were covered under the LegalMatch settlement continue to have them used in deceptive ads that lead to the websites of for-profit companies. Of these, 44 programs are subject to direct violations from LegalMatch or its partner company, GetLawyerNow.com.

Cybersquatting

Between November 2006 and May 2007 NTAP's AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer researched the website addresses (URLs) of all 138 LSC-funded legal aid programs and 54 statewide websites to see the results of mistyping the legal aid organization's url as a .COM or .NET website address. He recorded whether the mistyped domain names were owned by the legal aid program; whether they were open for purchase; or whether they retrieved the websites of a cybersquatter, an unrelated but legitimate business, or a private law firm.

Currently, 42% of LSC-funded programs with a website and 64% of statewide websites have some kind of cybersquatter.

Although the incidence of cybersquatting is high, 56% of legal aid programs can deter cybersquatting by purchasing open .net or .com domain names. As of June 2007, only 5 programs (4%) had done so.

Deceptive Advertising

In March 2006, NTAP and PTLA did a survey of legal aid programs nationwide to see who was interested in being a party of PTLA's LegalMatch Settlement. From April 2007 through June 2007, NTAP staff revisited these program names to see if LegalMatch had complied with the settlement, which specified that LegalMatch would not use these program names as search terms to advertise their services. We also wanted to see what other vendors had taken their place.

NTAP ran all 238 program names through four search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and AOL) to see whether the sponsored links strongly resembled or posed as the legal aid organization and/or whether those sponsored links were LegalMatch ads.

Research revealed that using a search engine to find Legal Aid programs is problematic. NTAP found:

• At least 1 advertisement for every program name searched that resembled the legal aid program name. Some searches returned up to 10 advertisements for just one program name search.
• 66 incidences of serious ad-word deception, in which the sponsored link closely resembles or names the legal aid program exactly, but routes to a different for-profit company. Of these 66 incidences, 44 of them were direct violations of the LegalMatch settlement.
• LegalMatch had largely corrected ad results for the search term “legal aid,” but users searching with the phrases “legal services” or “legal assistance” returned ad results with more infringments.

Combatting cyber piracy is important because cybersquatting and deceptive advertising misdirect, confuse and exploit the clients of most Legal Aid programs.

To learn more about our research or to find out how your program fared please take a look at our Cyber Piracy Project Report and the excel file for all datasets.