DomainTools Blog

The most recognized brand in Internet gambling is Bodog.com. However the domain was stolen in a court of law not less then 1 mile from my office. I would have expected to hear about something like this in a third world country. How can a US Judge decide against a foreign company for violating a US patent when that company doesn’t even operate inside the US? The judge has no business deciding this case and when seeing all the evidence I am perplexed this happened in my backyard.

Mel Molnick of Las Vegas filed for a process patient on remote betting using the Internet back in 1995. Mr. Molnick sued Bodog in Seattle for violating his patent, Bodog ignored the lawsuit because they where not even based in the US and didn’t think anything would happen to them. If someone sued you in a foreign country how likely would you be to fly there and defend yourself if you don’t have any assets in that country? This was the wrong mistake, the Judge made a default judgment against Bodog and awarded Mr. Molnick $48,937,456.00 in damages. Mr. Molnick instructed the judge to write into the judgment that eNom (the registrar) must turn over the domain names to Mr. Molnick.

Mel Molnick wasn’t looking for cash, he was looking for domain names. I think the Judge over reached his jurisdiction. A judge in Washington State can order a Washington State based registrar to turn over domain names. However, one would argue that domains were not even in Washington. They live in the root servers for dotcom and those reside all over the world and are controlled in Virgina by Verisign. Any company can add and delete things from the dotcom name servers if they pay the access fee to ICANN and sign an agreement with Verisign. If I was Mr. Molnick I would sue in Virgina. But which state to sue in is not really the issue. The issue is that a US judge is making judgments on foreign companies for violating US patents. Even if those patents are bogus and a first year par-legal could have defended Bodog. The issue is the Judge. Judges don’t go to tech school, they simple take the word of the plaintiff if the defendant never shows up. That is a very expensive lesson for Bodog. To overturn the judgment Bodog will need file a lot of motions and get a re-trial. They will win if they get the re-trial but with Football season beginning right now Bodog is missing a lot of regular customers.

Bogus US patents holders can troll for domain names that are worth millions of dollars. If a foreign company doesn’t take a US lawsuit seriously they are kidding themselves, you must defend even the most insane cases because the judge will just accept the word of the other side if you don’t show up in court.

I suspect more domains will be stolen with the help of the US court system in the future. That is totally sick.

Bodog appears to have not learned their lesson. Their first registrar eNom was in Washington state. The judge ordered the domains to be turned over. Well, Bodog when out and purchased newbodog.com to temporally replace their main domain names. They just added the word “new” to any domain name they lost in the law suit. “We are fighting this dispute and are confident that we will win,” says Ayre. “I sincerely apologize to any customers affected by our interruption.”

I have bad news for Ayre. All those “new” domains are registered with a second registrar called Dotster. Guess what, they are based in Washington State too. That Judge can go back and order those new domains be turned over as well. A total of 3000 domains were lost in the first case and the judge also awarded Mr. Molnick the Bodog trademark and ability to use the old logo.

Large Corporations generally don’t own generic domain names. They have their brands and their product names but they don’t own the category name. This is a short list of the corporations that own Single word domain names. We make an exception for two word category names that describe things very specifically, like Cream Cheese or Student Loan. If a company wants to sell Toothpaste they should own Toothpaste.com. They will own that domain forever and will be linked to that category and keyword in search engines and in public perception so strongly it almost gives them an unfair advantage. CNET has used this secret to become a huge company, they now dominate online with sites like News.com and Search.com. Some of CNET’s products may be 2nd or third class but that generic domain names gives them a lot of creditability. Search.com is crap, but people still type it in and use it. Weather.com is used so much because of its name and how easy it is to remember. It may not be the best weather service but it is the most used.

We are only listing Huge corporations, for example PeanutButter.com is on the list but Jelly.com is not. Some small companies in the future will be bought for one thing. Not there products or clients but their domain name. The small specialty foods company that owns Jelly.com will eventually be owned by a multiple national and at that point it will make the list. The way Microsoft got Live.com was because they bought the entire company, all they wanted was the domain. If you want something, just type dotcom on the end of it. Have you counted how many times a day you hear dotcom. This morning on the way to work I counted 7 of them in 20 minutes. I saw 4 of them driving past things. You don’t even need to market a great generic domain name, people just type them in because dotcom is advertised so strongly.

American Express - Open.com
AOL - When.com, Games.com, Love.com
Answers Corp. - Answers.com, Reference.com, Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com
Bank Of America - Loans.com
Barnes and Noble - Books.com
Bayer - Aspirin.com
Bass Pro Shops - Hunting.com
Brown Shoe Company - Shoes.com
Burlington Coat Factory - Coat.com
Calvin Klein - Bras.com and Underwear.com
Citibank - Student Loan.com
CNET -

Kids.com, Help.com, Computers.com, Download.com, Online.com, TV.com, Upload.com, News.com, Search.com, com.com, Builder.com, Gaming.com, Shopper.com, Marketplace.com, Updates.com, Store.com, Buying.com, Chat.com, Welcome.com, Browser.com, Shareware.com, Freeware.com, Auctions.com, Labs.com, Community.com, Silicon.com, Radio.com

CNN - Money.com
Old Country Buffet - Buffet.com
Diago - Malts.com, Rum.com, Scotch.com
Disney - Movies.com, Video.com, 101.com, Go.com, Family.com
Ebay (aka PayPal) - X.com
Fixodent - Dentures.com
1-800-flowers - Flowers.com
Food Network - Food.com
Google - Hello.com
Honda - Motorcycles.com
JC Penny - Gift.com
Johnson and Johnson - Baby.com
Kay Jewelers - Gold.com
Kraft - Cream Cheese.com
Marchex - Motherboard.com
MasterCard - Priceless.com
Merriam Webster - Word.com
Microsoft - Live.com, Surface.com, Start.com, TV.net, Investor.com
National Geographic - Documentary.com
Nissan - Z.com
Monster - Jobs.com
National Pen Company - Pens.com
Nestle - Meals.com
Office Depot - Office Supplies.com
PetSmart - Pets.com
Procter and Gamble - Toothpaste.com
QWest - Q.com, Fast Lane.com, Fog Light.com
Ralph Lauren - Polo.com, Rugby.com
Ragu - Sauce.com
R.H. Donnelley - Business.com, Work.com
Rocky Mountain Bicycles - Bikes.com
Roto Rooter - Plumber.com
Sports Endeavors - Soccer.com, Lacrosse.com
Sylvan Learning - Educate.com, Hop.com, Ivy.com
The History Channel - History.com
The Map and Globe Store - World Maps.com
The Weather Channel - Weather.com
The Wedding Channel - Weddings.com
Travelocity - Vacations.com
Unilever (Products include: Knorr, Slim Fast, Vasaline) - Soup.com, Peanut Butter.com
Yahoo - Contests.com, Broadcast.com

Domain Theft is a crime that is hard for a police officer to understand and equally as hard to doing anything about. This high tech crime can span international boundaries and go undetected until months after it has happened. By the time the victim realizes it the real thief is no where to be found. The new owner of the domain name may have thought they were getting a really good deal but will soon understand why the price was so low. The thief steals the domain and prices the domain low enough so that any domainer that understands the value of that domain would appear stupid if they didn’t buy the domain at that price.

This is the case of Raven.com. A man named Don Teske in Minneapolis started a company called Raven Computer Systems and in 1992 he registered the generic domain name, Raven.com. Several years went by and everything was fine for Raven Computer Systems. Don eventually died in October 3, 2005. That would seem like a pretty normal story if the story was to end at this point. However the story doesn’t end there. The widow of Mr. Teske had her email address at the domain and used it daily. One day her email stopped working and an IT person who was problem solving it for her let her know that she no longer controlled the domain. The domain was originally set to expire in 2008. So the obvious answer would have been that the domain had expired and she failed to pay the bill. This was not the case. She was clearly within her ownership window and didn’t need to renew the domain for another year.

This June the whois changed at Network Solutions. The dead man’s email address changed from dwt@Raven.com to “Kushaiah Gostowski<don_teske@yahoo.com>”. A new guy was on the record and his email address said, Don Teske at Yahoo.com. Someone had tricked Network Solutions to change the whois record. Kushaiah was now the person controlling the domain, Kushaiah quickly used his new ownership status to transfer the domain away from Network Solutions before Network Solutions could figure out they had been tricked. Domain theft 101, once you gain control of the domain, move it away from the current registrar.

The domain was moved to DirectNic 7 days later,  with the fake address now listed on the whois record as 123 Main St. Fresno, CA 94205. The address changed again to the new fake address of One Wilshire Blvd, Los angeles, CA 90010 and was listed for sale on Sedo. Mark Colton with the email address of ravenheadinc@gmail.com then profited $3,500 from the sale on July 3rd 2007.  The winner of the Sedo auction is unknown because they transfered the domain to GoDaddy on July 12th and hid behind a proxy service of GoDaddy. Did the thief launder the domain and make it look like it was sold to someone? Or did someone truly buy the domain for $3,500. The reason this theft was spotted was because the domain Raven.com should be worth $75,000 to $200,000. The quick sale at Sedo makes it look like the theft got quick cash for the domain or it was a fake transaction. But why did the domain go up for sale on eBay after the move to GoDaddy. Yes, it was once again listed for sale however this time no one bid.

Resolution. There currently isn’t one. The domain remains at GoDaddy in a hidden ownership state. Directnic and GoDaddy both have the email addresses and payment information of the people involved with the transaction. Something must be done and more information is needed on this case. I would like to see Mrs. Teske with her domain back as quickly as possible. I am shocked that it has taken this long and I still see no progress.

I am considering setting up a public note system on whois records at DomainTools. It would allow anyone to post a note about a domain. Checking the Title on a domain is very important before a sale, the history records we keep are some of the only public documents that allow people to track down crime. Buying a stolen domains is easy if there are no historical whois records. I wish we could do more to help and I am brainstorming ways right now.

Large corporations tell a lot of secrets and they don’t even know it. The DomainTools Name Server Spy allows people to monitor name servers for changes. To test our own service I monitor a few interesting name servers. Disney Internet Group is one of them. For example, on the 25th of this month we spotted Super Blu Ray.com get registered. Could this be the name of the second generation Blu-Ray discs? I think so. I am still confused. Sony developed the Blu-Ray disc so I am not sure what Disney is doing yet. I guess we will wait and see.

Another example earlier this month was on the 6th when Disney registered a brand new domain called, High School Musical Live On Stage.com. What a long domain name! It must be for a new production they are setting up for either a TV show on ABC, a Musical on Broadway, or a new Movie. Had someone been watching they would have seen this intent and known that domain would never fly. Less the 2 weeks later and we can see Disney ended up purchasing the more generic domain High School Musical.com. I don’t think I will watch this show because I hate musicals but at least Disney is getting the generic domain names.

My favorite so far is the new Reality TV show that must have made it as a TV pilot, Russian To The Altar.com. I can’t wait! I wonder if it will make it to air.

It is so much fun to come up with theories on what peoople are doing with their new domain names.

I just read a blog post from ShoeMoney that made my head spin. He said he got an email from an editor at DMOZ which demanded $5,000 or his site would be de-listed. He ignored the email and a few days later the guy emailed again letting him know he had been delisted and that he should re-think the $5,000 offer. Sure enough he had been delisted. Instead of caving in he blogged about it. The best weapon against corruption is a huge public spotlight.

A lot of people that I talk to don’t understand what DMOZ is. It is an Open Directory run by AOL (formerly Netscape) that lists websites along with a small description next to them. It is considered by a lot of people to be the start of the Internet. If you designed a search engine crawler this could be the first site you would crawl and from there you could reach any other site. Sort of a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon thing but for the web. Any way, Google and Microsoft both use this website as one of their primary building blocks for crawling the web. At least that has been the case historically. There are so many clones of the site now that getting listed in the DMOZ (or AKA ODP Open Directory Project) it can still carry a lot of weight.

For a number of years Whois.sc (AKA DomainTools) has been assisting editors of DMOZ for free. We help the DMOZ editors by giving away free access to premium DomainTools memberships. The tools we provide help those editors maintain and groom the directory. There are so many DMOZ editors we limited our donation to only the top editors. The highest status an Editor can be is Meta, then comes EditAll, then comes the normal editors. We currently have 2 Staff, 108 Meta Editors, and 8 EditAlls using our system. You can’t apply for this membership class through any sign-up form on our site. A few select DMOZ staff editors have an interface at DomainTools for granting special access to these Meta Editors.

I honestly think most of the editors are good and try to do there best to create the best human edited directory of websites in the world. Corruption can happen in any organization so I hope this situation is resolved quickly and that the bad apple is thrown out. Abusing a position like that is just down right sick. I have seen too many meta editors spend years of their life organizing the web for no pay at all to start believing tails that DMOZ as a whole is corrupt. Just as Police have Internal Affairs that investigate other Police the DMOZ has a system too. The abuse reporting system is located at http://report-abuse.dmoz.org. This site will investigate reports of abuse and take action. I would encourage people to submit reports of abuse directly to this page.

I often wonder why some of the editors would serve for free, could it be to get better placement for their sites. It would be nice to see a few paid editors that have taken a vow of no affiliation with any site. I don’t think there is enough transparency in the DMOZ system. Sites like Wikipedia have that transparency because every edit is being watched and it goes directly back to a user’s history. I helped start AboutUs.org because I thought it would be a way for everyone to edit a web directory. I think there is plenty of room for more directories. DMOZ is not perfect but I don’t think it is broken either. I would like to see more transparency at DMOZ in the future.

A little more media coverage of Business.com today, this time from CNBC. While Business.com was less about a domain transaction, this last time it was sold, Squawk Box called it a domain transaction and it sheds more light on the industry. The first time it sold it was very much a domain transaction.

You can read some of our previous coverage of Business.com. Enjoy the video clip below.

I thought I would share the Frank Schilling keynote from the Domain Roundtable last week. Frank shares some insights on how he got started and where the industry is going. Frank figured out early on that domains with PPC advertising can be a good thing. This is a great recap of how Frank got to where he is today and a few hints about where he plans to go in the future.

Many people didn’t renew domain names in the dotcom crash and Frank re-doubled his effort to pour all his revenue back into buying generic keyword domains. Frank reflects how history doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes so there are lessons to learn from his domain history.

The most amusing part is minute 31:55 where Frank jokes that he just made $100 exhaling. There is also a mention of George Kirikos at spot 42:04, Frank helped co-found the ICA with Bob Martin after that conversation with George. At the very end, minute 52, Frank talks about possibly creating a super brand by redirecting all his traffic to a portal and building a brand around it. Traffic measurement companies like COMscore can’t seem to track Frank’s traffic because it is spread out on so many different domain names. Frank owns 320,000 domain names but it would be hard for any advertising company to see he has around 30 million unique visitors a month. In comparison, the most watched TV show on National TV every week only has 20 Million viewers.

Sedo just sold LI.com for $500,000. This is the second 2 letter domain to sell for $500,000 this month.  The other one was AZ.com at our auction last week. There are only 676 of these 2 letter domains in the world and most of them are owned by large corporations. I know there is a lot of pressure on ICANN to release a few of the single character domain names. If they did get released, they could fetch a few million each and bring ICANN some extra funds to help administrate the Internet.

I remember back in 2001 when you could buy a two letter domain name for $8,000. Granted the one I was looking had an X in it. But still, the price of 2 letter domain names are going up.

As we update everyone that has either bought or sold a domain at our auction, we are communicating through email. If you have not received an email,  then there is another way we can communicate with you. Inside the members area we have created a communication announcement that is drafted directly for you.

The location is www.domaintools.com/members/

If your spam filter blocks us, the email address we are using is “agreement <at> domainroundtable.com“.

Here is what we have sent so far:

- For Buyers we have already sent out payment instructions.

- For Sellers we have sent notices of what was sold and at what price.

Tomorrow we are releasing an interface for upload auth-info codes for your sold domains. If you have sold a domain, you can obtain your auth-info code from your registrar and get that ready for us. Also be sure to unlock your domain(s) so that we can transfer it once we have the code. The interface will also allow us to collect a method to pay you as well. We will ask for your address to send a check or for your bank information so that we can wire you money.

I am proud to announce that the fourth annual Domain Roundtable will be held April 18th-20th in San Francisco. It will be held between two really awesome events, directly after Ad Tech (April 15th - 17th) and right before Web 2.0 Expo (April 22nd - April 25th).

We have a simple formula. Domains + Ads + Web 2.0 = San Francisco 2008

This will be the first city outside of Seattle that gets to experience a Domain Roundtable in action. It will take a few months of preparation and a lot of hard work to make this next conference the best conference we have ever hosted. We hope to bring in a lot of Bay Area people and companies for the event. If you have any ideas for events or are interested in sponsorship please email sf2008 <at> domainroundtable.com. Please save the dates and prepare for an awesome domain conference. We are looking for fresh new ideas and concepts for the show, so please email us with your ideas or what you would like to see and what is missing.