If you buy the storefront of a company that went out of business, keep the signage so their old customers will come in looking for them, and install a conveyor belt that whisks them directly to your store instead, yeah, that's unethical.

There's honestly not a great meatspace analogy to the situation, no matter how you look at it. But it's clearly not the same as just buying foreclosed real estate.

My local convience store is called Tom's.. It has been around for many years. The current chinese owners never changed the name nor the owners before. Same sign, same products.. nothing unethical.

Kind of like when a big company buys a smaller company and keeps the brand name.

> Same sign, same products.. nothing unethical.

Exactly. If it's basically the same business under new management, there's nothing wrong with keeping the name. If it's a new business with no relationship to the old, trading on the name to grant false credibility and bring confused customers into their own shop, that's unethical.

And kinda stupid if you're trying to game the reputation of a business that went bust.

Buying a doctor’s practice feels a lot like this to me.

I can imagine circumstances where I’d find it ethical, for example when the expired domain name in itself is useful to you (say, you want to move your own site to wisconsincarpetcleaners.com instead of .info or whatever)

If you do it only to freeload off someone else’s reputation, that doesn’t seem great to me. For the comparison to real-estate, I have nothing to add beyond what PhasmaFelis wrote.