Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Screwcybersquatters.com: "The Simpsons Movie" Name Returns to Fox

A cybersquatter has been kicked to the curb when he tried to charge FOX $50,000 for the domain name "thesimpsonsmovie.com." In case you're not familiar with it, a cybersquatter is someone who buys up domain names in the hopes of getting someone who wants the name to pay them for it. In case you can't tell, I hate cybersquatters with a passion. It's a scourge that hasn't been adequately dealt with, in my opinion. You can type in any word in the dictionary and odds are that you'll find a placeholder page advertising some search engine or web hosting service, wasting space that some people who might have put that site to good use can no longer have. Worse yet, some cybersquatters will buy up other people's names or movie URLs to basically hold them for ransom. That's the case in this one. The cybersquatter even used the URL to promote his podcast and advertise a pornographic Simpsons website. Thankfully, the EU has ordered him to give up the site. Here's hoping this will go a long way towards convincing these losers that nobody's gonna pay them for their crappy URLs.

2 comments:

Maurice Mitchell said...

I heard that man. That's the most blatant extortion I've ever seen, and pointing people to a porn site is just sick. As a side note: try the simponsizer. It works!

Nigel G Mitchell said...

That Simpsonizer is hysterical...although the image scan doesn't work too well. They would be better off just making a Mister Potatohead style thing that lets you choose it manually like M&M.