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Sex.com Case Finally 'Over'
Spad writes "The Register is reporting that Stephen Michael Cohen has, unsurprisingly, lost his appeal against the $65m in costs awarded to Gary Kremen for defrauding him out of the sex.com domain name almost 6 years ago. However, Cohen is currently a fugitive from justice in Mexico, with his assets in various offshore accounts, making it very difficult for Mr Kremen to claim his money. Kremen is now pursuing a $100m suit against VeriSign for signing over the domain in the first place, which he is expected to win." See our previous story for more background.
From http://reward.sex.com/
Offer To Pay Reward Is Withdrawn
Dated June 26, 2001 at 2:00 PM PDT.
The offer to pay a reward for information leading to the arrest of Stephen Cohen is hereby withdrawn. In other words, no reward is available.
It looks like the bounty is a measly $50,000.
I might be crazy, but I'm not crazy enough to get in a gun fight with Mexican police for a chance at $50,000.
It's a voucher for a service, not property of value. Much like you go to the gas station and buy a ticket for the car-wash. The face-value of the ticket is worthless, and it expires in time. But, punch that number into the machine and your car is washed. How many times have you tried to redeem the 1/100th of 1 cent in coupons from the Saturday paper?
I used to work for these 2 guys that paid Cohen to put their banners on sex.com. The reason this domain is so sought after is becasue it rakes in somthing like a 200,000$ a day just on referal sign-up traffic. You had to pay Cohen 10k-20k A DAY just to have your pr0n banner on the front of sex.com's site. So with no overhead, just one html page that needs to be served, its a genius business model. I actually got to meet Cohen, and he is not someone you wanna mess with. Right when he walked in our office you could tell, he was ready to beat the crap outta anyone who looked at him wrong. This was back in 1999, Unfortunately, the original owner will probably not see a dime from Cohen.
The article quoted in the story was posted in December -- all of this stuff REALLY isn't news. In August of 2002, the Ninth Circuit finally got fully fed up with Cohen, who continued to have lawyers work his case while abusing litigation process and with his fugitive status. Cohen's lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court to take up that decision -- the dismissal of Cohen's appeal, but retained the questions of the Kremen lawsuit as against all the remaining defendants.
On June 9th, the Supreme Court denied certiorari (that is, refused to take up the appeal of Dismissal of Cohen from the appeal under the fugitive disentitlement doctrine).
When I last checked, the main issues on appeal devolved to a question certified by the 9th circuit to the California Supreme Court on the question whether California law permitted a cause of action for "conversion" with respect to intangible contract rights, such as a domain name. (In an opinion by which Judge Kozinski wrote BOTH the prevailing opinion AND the dissent. Does anyone know the status of that portion of the case?
So, while Mr. Cohen is a ghost (both legally and fugitively), all of the issues in the case remain, and are likely to be litigated for so long as we breathe -- at least it would seem. NSI/Varisign has been, alas, too cavalier and arbitrary in their management of domain name reassignment and disputes, creating a great deal of trouble for those unfamiliar with how they operate -- even those who irrevocably lose control of a domain name. Holding them accountable might change some of their "policies," possibly for good or bad. That will be the only likely legacy of sex.com.
My own experience is that Verisign broke their own procedures and re-configured my the primary/secondary nameservers for my company's domain name.
We set up website hosting through a third party. I intended to keep control of the DNS. However, the website hosting firm put in a request to Versign to move the nameservers to the hosting company's servers from my nameservers.
Versign sent an email to the correct address to request approval for the change, stating that if we did nothing, the change would NOT go ahead.
Yet it did. Versign made the change! I spent the rest of the day shouting at them on the phone trying to get them to change it back before the scheduled update. They refused.
I sent an email to their "investigations" department. Strangely, I heard NOTHING back.
I will NEVER register a domain name through them again!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!