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Typosquatting and the Duty to Police Infringing Trademarks: Initial Interest Confusion and 'Post-Initial Confusion'

By Mitchell Zimmerman

You are the owner of KibbleSoft, the widely used fuzzy-logic retail management software package for pet food distributors. Understanding the value of the KibbleSoft brand, you have registered the trademark and carefully policed against infringers for a number of years. And having early grasped the importance of the Internet for promoting your brand, you were also a step ahead of the cybersquatters and acquired the kibblesoft.com domain in 1996. Much of your business now runs through your heavy-trafficked Web site at www.kibblesoft.com.

Recently, however, your trademark attorneys have brought a new problem to your attention: typosquatters. Parties unrelated to KibbleSoft LLC have registered a number of variants of your domain name, including among many others wwwkibblesoft.com, kibbelsoft.com, kbblesoft.com, and kibblseoft.com. The owners of these domains seek to profit, in one manner or another, from either common typographical errors or misspellings of the kibblesoft.com domain name.

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