DomainTools Blog

The Aftermarket.com Domainer Mardi Gras auction has, thus far, gathered excellent submissions. Many people acted on the ‘early submission’ selection due date of today. Those names will have priority in the reviewing and selection process. The final date for submissions is January 30, 2009, which means there is still time to submit your domains. Reviewing starts immediately after that by the Domain Consultant team. The catalog and silent bidding starts February 13. The auction is scheduled for February 21, from 2:45-4:15pm CST, 90 minutes of live auction activity. Space is limited – Get your submissions in now for consideration!

If you participated in a previous Aftermarket.com auction, please note that the process to submit domains has been simplified for this and future auctions. After logging into your auction domain manager, you will now see a list of the domains submitted for the Down Under auction presented, without specific sales data such as price, lot association or description. This was designed so domain entries can be customized according to each auction.

The process to submit domains is now as follows: Select the domain you want to submit. Then, in the Actions drop down box, chose the Migrate to Domainer Mardi Gras. These domains will then be listed in the Domainer Mardi Gras tab. It is likely each domains status is ‘Pending Item Verification’ and requires the email verification to be sent again; click the verification link to proceed. This action ensures that the domain ownership has not changed since the previous auction submission. In this tab, update each domain sales data that is specific for this auction. New domains not previously submitted to any auction can be added by selected the ‘Add Domains to this Auction’ button at the top of the frame.

According to the Domainer Mardi Gras website, the hotel early bird special ends January 19, 2009, and space is limited – if not already sold out! Don’t miss out on another successful Aftermarket.com auction or the Domainer Mardi Gras conference.

SnapNames was recently awarded patent #7,742,160, as brought to light at Domain Name Wire. The primary points of the patent cover the ability to capture domain names dropped for non-renewal, ‘tagging’ names and acquisition monitoring services.

Primary competitors in the dropped names capturing mechanism include NameJet and Pool, both of which could be in violation. The tagging process is quite interesting as well. Tagging names is their method of quantifying interest of a name. It would appear that you could lose your “next in line” status if they decided to send a higher-ranked domain to auction.

Of particular note is their description of domain monitoring services. Their stated claims in the invention ostensibly constrain the monitoring services to apply only to monitoring and valuing expiring domains. However, their description of the monitoring service states, among other examples, that a monitoring service could be used to “track competitor’s movements” and have “multiple subscribers per domain”. The monitoring services could be “offered independently from … the acquisition services”. Those statements may broaden the application of the patent beyond simple acquisition services and could directly affect monitoring services currently offered by many companies in the industry.

Not only does the patent give the lawyers at Oversee.net, SnapNames’ parent company, something to do, but it could affect the marketplace and healthy competition. If SnapNames pursues this patent and requires competition to license the technology, they could become the only contender in the dropped names aftermarket and monitoring services – a huge advantage for them, but it may prove unhealthy for the market. Or, it could be good… ? Healthy competition can spur innovation.

So while this may be a boon for SnapNames and Oversee, it’s an even better win for their lawyers, depending on how the patent is interpreted, as they weed through potential violators.