Business Ethics 3rd Edition by Laura Hartman

Exercise 4

The term cybersquatting refers to the practice of: registering a large number of website domain names hoping to sell them at huge prices to others who may want the URL or who are prepared to pay to get rid of a potentially confusing domain name. For instance, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which operates www.peta.org, was able to shut down http://www.peta.com/, a pro-hunting website that dubbed itself "People Eating Tasty Animals." Cybersquatters often determine possible misspellings or slightly incorrect websites with the hopes that the intended website will pay them for their new domain. For example, someone paid over $7 million for the address www.business.com. In one case, one day after a partnership was announced that would result in an online bookstore for the Toronto Globe Mail newspaper, Richard Morochove, a technology writer, registered the domain chapters-globe.com. When the partnership demanded that he stop using the name, he promptly agreed, as long as he received a percentage of the sales from the Chapters/Globe website. The case went to trial. In situations such as these, do you believe the cybersquatter is doing anything wrong? What options might the "intended website" owner have?