Site forced to give domain to Salesforce.com — Windows Phone

Salesforce.com awarded hyphenated version of popular AppExchange.com web site.

A service that helps app creators submit their wares to the Windows Phone marketplace must give its domain name to Salesforce.com, an arbitration panel has ruled.

Singapore based App Port LLP hosts its web site at App-Exchange.com. The problem? Salesforce.com owns the popular AppExchange.com and has international trademarks for the term “AppExchange”, counting in Singapore.

While App Port argued that its services were distinguishable from what Salesforce offers on AppExchange, the panel was unpersuaded.

App Port certainly made a poor naming decision here.

That stated, I disagree with one of Salesforce.com’s allegations and the panelist’s concurrence:

Finally, Complainant accuses Respondent of engaging in typosquatting when it registered the app-exchange.com domain name. Complainant argues that the only difference between Complainant’s mark and the disputed domain name is the hyphen and the gTLD. Therefore, Complainant alleges that Respondent attempted to take advantage of a common error that Internet users may make when attempting to find Complainant online.

The Panel agrees.

Adding a hyphen to a domain is a typo? I disagree. How often do people accidentally hit the hyphen key when typing a domain name? Yes, the hyphen is next to “p”, but this is still far-fetched.

Now, I believe that some people looking for AppExchange.com insert a hyphen, but not as a typo. It’s since they think that’s the actual site’s domain name.