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.