Oprah sues cybersquatters

American talk show host Oprah Winfrey made news last week when she became one of many celebrities lately to go after cybersquatters.

In this case, Winfrey and her broadcasting company, Harpo Entertainment Group, are suing a group of nutritional supplement websites. The sites sell weight and anti-aging products, and feature fake endorsements from Oprah and the show’s resident physician, Dr. Mehmet Oz. To reinforce these claims, the sites are located on domains such as www.drozadvice.com and www.oprahdietsecret.com.

Many companies and media labels have been known to be very abusive with cybersquatting claims, but this looks like an open-and-shut case to me. The domains are clearly being used in bad faith and a number of the sites are notorious for ripping off consumers.

Source | Business Week

Photo | Flickr

Datacenter Customers Get £1 Million Settlement

A federal judge in Maryland today approved a £1.07 million ($1.67 million USD) settlement today for nearly 5,500 customers of NaviSite, a datacenter that suffered long downtime after several servers were accidentally unplugged.

NaviSite had told its customers to expect downtime for a server upgrade. Instead of upgrading the servers, however, they were unplugged when the company attempted to move them to a new location.

Nearly 200,000 websites suffered slow performance or were completely unavailable for as little as a few days to several weeks. The customers received four times their monthly bill in the settlement. The largest amount won by any one customer was £6,446 ($10,000 USD).

For ecommerce sites that lost customers, however, the equivalent of a few month’s free hosting won’t make up for the lost business. Some companies report losing as many as half their clients because of the outage.

The lead lawyer in the case, Stuart A. Davidson, made this comment:

Things just went completely awry. It may not be that big of a deal for maybe a book club … but for companies that actually sell, like e-commerce companies, being down for one hour, much less a day or weeks or more….

Source: Maryland Daily Record