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The Sex.Com Story Continues
wherley writes "This story at news.com tells the tale of the lucrative sex.com domain, the incompetent Verisign transfer per forged request, and the $65 million dollars in damages hanging in the breeze."
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Once you have payed for your domain name from dotster.com, they want you to buy the NameSafe service for an extra $10 per year, to "prevent any unauthorized changes from being made to your domain." Should I need to buy insurance, or should they guarantee their product?
they don't have a customer service phone number
That's not true, I have called it numerous times. I never could talk to a person, but there was a customer service number, and a machine to answer it.
In the end I paid them for another year, since they refused to transfer my domain name to another registrar, or even provide me any way to talk to them and request it.
They do provide handy forms online if you want to transfer from another registrar, just no help at all if you want to transfer from them. I guess I could take them to court, but I'm not going to, since it would cost me way more than it will to just pay them their yearly fee. Nice business model, get them hooked, and make it too expensive to get them to perform their job properly.
Ah but the pesky rules of evidence won't allow for such an inference. Assuming of course that the jurisdiction in question follows the Federal Rules of Evidence (which most do). Rule 407 specifically disallows evidence of subsequent remedial measures to be used as evidence to prove negligence (reasonable person stuff blah blah), culpable conduct, etc etc. Granted you can use this sort of thing to show anything other than negligence, but if this is what his case is resting on then it won't last long since he hasn't shown they are negligent...but then again I didn't read the case so I don't know what else he was offering.
Similarly, stealing the domain name for a high taffic pay-site (and being sex.com you KNOW it had to have huge amounts of traffic) and funneling those users to your pay-site is no less a crime. The logs on that domain would have to be staggering. I'm fairly certain that's where the $65 million judgement comes from.
As a side note, wouldn't it be interesting to grep those logs and see what your neighbor's been up to?
--If you code for the exceptions, the rules fall into place
David Dolkas, an attorney at Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich, the firm representing VeriSign, said that if the judges were asking "is the DNS database somehow representative of an ownership right, the answer is no."
"Why not?" Kozinski replied. "Why isn't that exactly what it is?"
The first court was wrong, Kozinksi is appealing.
On the the other hand... if the "No Physical Property" argument is true, let the MP3 trading begin!