I don’t know about immoral, but it is at the very least a bit sleazy. When I look for domains for side projects, I very rarely have to abandon a name because it’s been taken by an actual operational service; it’s almost always because someone is squatting it with a “parking” page filled with sketchy ads that they’re paying almost nothing for. That isn’t doing any good for anyone besides the squatter.
yeah just like laying claim to the most fertile land in your region, doing nothing with it, and waiting until your neighbors are sufficiently desperate to sell it to them for gigantic markup
hugely value-added activity, and a well-earned increment.
A lot of the value of these domains stems from the popularity of sites they may have been attached to in the past, or search terms that relate to them.
So these people are literally making money off of the back of others’ work whilst providing no benefit themselves, probably not that much even to their advertisers.
Such squatting sites are, at best, an annoyance to web users as well.
The one takeaway I got from my engineering ethics class in college was that everyone has different morals. Debating if something is “moral” or not is useless. Education on a subject is useful, but once someone understands your point of view and still thinks it’s within/outside their morals, there’s nothing more to discuss.
Agreed. The main problem with domain squatting and sniping is scammers either trying to impersonate another organization, or extort trademark owners into paying insane amount of money to obtain a domain which has no legitimate use to the current holder. Neither are happening here. Friendster intentionally let the domain and trademark go, and there isn't any entity that holds a legitimate claim to that name anymore.
I don't think that old business names should be "retired" and forever banned from use. After a certain amount of time the name should be free for someone to use again, and 10 years of non-use seems reasonable to me. The main concern with reuse is confusing consumers into thinking they are dealing with the old friendster, but I think consumers are savvy enough to realize that an old trademark rising from the dead often has nothing to do with the original, regardless of whether the current trademark holders purchased rights from the original, or claimed abandoned ones, as in this case.
His other business dealings aside, I don't have a problem with how he obtained/revived the friendster domain and trademark.