Zuccarini is no stranger to domain name disputes, having lost
actions to actor Kevin Spacey and companies including FAO Schwarz,
Alta Vista and others. In October 2001, the Federal Trade
Commission took court action over his usual practice of registering
internet domain names that were misspellings of legitimate domain
names or brands – known as typosquatting. For example, he
registered 41 variations on the name of pop star Britney Spears.
Surfers who looked for a site but misspelled its web address were
taken to his sites.
The most likely candidates to misspell addresses are,
inevitably, children. Zuccarini had at one stage over 5,500 domain
names registered, including, to use examples from the latest
complaint, teltubbies and bobthebiulder.
Once in a Zuccarini site, users were bombarded with a flurry of
pop-up windows displaying ads for goods and services ranging from
internet gambling to porn. In some cases, the legitimate web site
the consumer was attempting to access also was launched, so
consumers thought the hailstorm of ads to which they were being
exposed was from a legitimate web site.
And a Zuccarini site is very difficult to leave. In a practice
known as mousetrapping, programming code at the sites obstructed
surfers' ability to close their browser or to go back to the
previous page. Clicks on the 'close' or 'back' buttons caused new
windows to open, and more ads to appear – in the hope that the user
will click on one and transfer to the advertised site.
Zuccarini, according to the complaint, was paid a referral fee
of between 10 to 25 cents whenever a user moved on from his site to
one of the sites advertised. The scheme earned him up to $1 million
a year, and a huge number of complaints and civil court
actions.
These culminated in May last year when a US District Court
permanently barred Zuccarini from diverting or obstructing
consumers on the internet and from launching web sites or web pages
that belong to unrelated third parties. The court also barred him
from participating in advertising affiliate programmes on the
internet, and ordered him to pay almost $1.9 million in
damages.
But Zuccarini has not complied with the order, according to the
new complaint. He now faces a criminal prosecution, under
legislation passed in April this year.
The Truth in Domain Names statute makes it a crime to use "a
misleading domain name on the internet to deceive a minor into
viewing material that is harmful to minors on the internet." If
convicted, Zuccarini could face a jail term of up to four
years.
"Children make mistakes," said US Attorney James Comey. He told
the New York Times, "The idea that someone would take advantage of
that, of a young girl, for example, trying to go to the American
Girl Web site to look at dolls or a child trying to visit the
Teletubbies web site, and mistypes, to take advantage of those
mistakes to direct those children to pornography sites is beyond
offensive."
