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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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Just kidding. This case is out of hand.
One note though, a lot of people see nothing wrong with someone "stealing" a porn website, because they think porn is wrong, and stealing is wrong. But pornography is legal, stealing is illegal. I'm sure that this is one huge reason this case hasn't been settled yet.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
First off, most /.ers don't read the articles to begin with. Secondly, we all know that there won't be any cool pictures in that article or any other CNet article. Third, keep in mind that CNet also runs download.com which I'm sure has a million users a day, all tranferring complete applications measureable in megabytes, where as the webpage is probably only 50k or so. I doubt they even noticed the blip on the OC999999999 utilization graphs.
When I was much younger (and I'm 20 now.. :) I did the security for a certain porn sites, and learnt a lot about how they work.
In the end it worked out more profitable to them to just redirect their traffic to the bigger porn sites than to try to deal with the customers themselves.
For every customer you get to do the $5 trial, we would get $20!
When spamming, we would get a hit rate of around 1 in 1000 - so basically if we sent 10k emails, we would get $200.
I only dealt with the security side, and didn't work there for long btw.
I suppose that depends on it. I think that if a lucrative domain name sends a letter asking for a transfer, the domain controller should be contacted.
Well, a letter *is* contact. According to the article, the guy got sex.com for five years. The big unanswered question here is, once they knew of their error, why didn't they give it back?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Why did it take 5 years to get the domain name back?
It seems that if he had pursued the return of the domain early, that there would not have been 5 years to run up $65million in lost revenues.
How is this verisign's problem? Forged documents - One letter, return of domain name. I just don't understand.
Did Verisign refuse to return the name registration??
Anything you say will be held against you.
I think you've hit on the main point of the appeal. Money/safety desposit box items/etc. are all physical property. The original court ruled that Verisign can't be held accountable because no physical property was involved. The article didn't make it clear (at least to me) why this made a difference.
Oh man, I know it's a joke, but it's very close to the real thing. I work for a domain reseller/hosting company and we currently get our domains through opensrs at reseller prices. Before opensrs we were using verisign, they charged us the typical $35 a year, and they ache every time we transfer a domain. They first called us and asked us pretty please to stop transfering domains. We basically laughed at them and told them we'd transfer back as soon as they could offer a cheaper price. I mean, it's a pretty simple service. Then came the shirts. They sent us a t-shirt for most of our domains that hadn't been transfered. We got some hemp ones, ones we didn't know or care we had. I'd much rather have a verisign shirt I can jog in and thrash instead of e-xxxcentral.com or whatever russian bride domain we might have registered over the years. And then the other day I call from Verisign *VIP* services. And the person reading the script said that we were valuble to the company. I tried to get them to voicemail because my boss didn't want to talk to them.
Network Solutions should have returned the domain the same day they were notified it had been hijacked. The damages are their failure to promptly fix their own mistake, not the guy who actually took it.
Let's get one thing straight here... morally Verisign is completely in the clear, and this joker hiding in Mexico is completely to blame. Verisign received a forged letter, which they acted upon. They had no intent to harm the legitimate owner.
The question is, does Verisign have any legal responsibility. Ideally, no one would ever forge a letter to Verisign (or my bank), and it wouldn't be an issue. Since it's well known that seedy elements do exist in society, organizations have some obligations to guard against fraud. So what exactly should they have to do to guard against fraud?
Of course, in the end, it will come down to a judges interpretation of existing laws, and how they apply to domain names. For the purposes of this discussion though, I'd argue that they probably did enough and should not be held liable, certainly not for anything near the full 65 million dollar amount. It sounds like this occurred early in the development of the internet, at a time when procedures and practices surrounding domain names was just being thought out. Obviously now that movies about websites are being made (fear.com), the thought of turning over a domain without contacting the owner for independent verification seems negligent. And of course, they don't do that now. If someone told you about this in 1995 though, I doubt it would have seemed nearly so clear cut.
That still leaves open the question of why it took five years to get back the domain name. If Verisign was just lazy, well, that's another story, which we don't seem to have many details on. For now, I'll assume Verisign acted reasonably here (perhaps not a good assumption based on other comments about Verisign posted here...).
In short, it's an unfortunate situation (kind of... it is sex.com after all), but Verisign shouldn't have to pay.