• ReadWriteWeb , Tuesday, January 15, 2008 12:45 PM

Richard MacManus is publisher of the ReadWriteWeb Network of blogs, a group of successful tech-focused Websites that include Alt Search Engines, as well as the namesake blog. ReadWriteWeb has built up equity within the search and dot-com communities--so naturally someone took note of it and sought to profit from that popularity.

"I am going to launch ReadWriteWeb.mobi, the mobile version of ReadWriteWeb optimized for viewing on a mobile phone," said a Mr. Sobolev, a Russia-based Web entrepreneur, via email. "Thought you might be interested."

MacManus was quite interested, and what followed was a series of emails back and forth between them, with MacManus threatening legal action for trademark infringement and content scraping, and Sobolev being snarky about how hard it is to pursue IP rights internationally. Sobolev also made note of the fact that MacManus hadn't actually trademarked "ReadWriteWeb," but did backtrack a bit and say that his .mobi site wouldn't scrape MacManus' content.

It's the prime example of what some Webmasters call "brand squatting"--or trying to profit from the online equity someone has built up for their brand. Sobolev will likely add some original content to the ReadWriteWeb.mobi site, though there is a strong possibility that it will actually be scraped from multiple sites across the Web and monetized via AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network. And given the popularity of the term "ReadWriteWeb," if Sobolev tweaks the site for SEO, it could even end up ranking quite high in the SERPs and garnering even more traffic.

Read the whole story at ReadWriteWeb »