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Register.com Loses Class action Lawsuit
Anonymous Blowhard writes "I found out today I am a member of a class that just beat register.com in New York Supreme Court!! The suit was filed by Michael Zurakov because register.com pointed his newly registered domain(s) to 'coming soon' web pages. Mr. Zurakov receives $12,500 for the harm caused by register.com while members of the class can look forward to a settlement of $5 off their next domain renewals. Register.com will also pay 'reasonable Class Counsel attorneys'
fees and costs in an amount not to exceed $642,500.00, subject to Court approval.' If you want to exclude yourself from the class, giving up any settlement and not being bound by its terms, you have to opt-out."
Presumably all the company will do is add a clause to their terms and conditions that allows them to explicitly do this anyway.. But tying up every new attempt to use the technology in clauses and legalese is hardly going to free people to experiment...
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
Seems to me it would be a no-brainer to opt out of a $5 class settlement. Why waive all future claims against a measly $5??
Does everything include nothing?
$12.5K for that? How was he harmed? He had tools to point it elsewhere.
Technically, the $12.5K is for his services in representing the class. Otherwise, he likely would only get $5 as well. Still, what a completely frivolous lawsuit. It doesn't say in the article, but did he at least try to negotiate up-front first before wasting over half a million dollars in legal expenses?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
This case was just a shakedown. To prevent it from happening again, members of the class can object to the attorney's fees awarded in the settlement.
See Sec. VII (C) of the linked document for reference.
RDC actually sends me coupons for more than $5 to entice me to keep using their service. This is pretty much the same thing. So they're effectively paying me nothing, paying the plaintiff $12.5K and paying the lawyers $650K.
I Object!
I know exactly what you mean but your example doesn't hold very well because I remember a few years ago loads of people were suing Manchester council for ... tripping over the pavement and 'breaking' their ankles.
The trouble with America is that (bastard) lawyers come along and tell people they could make loadsa money if they sue company x for something that happened to them even if they hadn't thought about it seriously before.
Agreed. I opted out and sent an e-mail to the plaintiff's lawyers protesting.
This is the sort of litigious bull**** that we could do without. If the guy didn't know better than to submit his domain without name servers, or didn't know that these things don't get organized immediately, then he should sue whoever told him how to set up a website. Or better yet, he should just chock it up to learning the new forms of business in the internet age.
And class action my butt. It implies that he was doing this for all those people who were wronged by the defendant. If there were serious damages done, we'd have heard more about it from the enraged masses, and the settlement would have been something real or substantial. This was just a way to "lawyer up."
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
It is a tiny minority of Americans that file stupid lawsuits.
Americans laugh at these idiots too.
Frequently, the media portrays the lawsuits as idiotic, but when you dig into the details and hear the other side it is not so idiotic. Case in point, the famous case of the old women suing McDonald's for the hot coffee spilled on her. Stupid lawsuit until you read the full story behind it. That McDonald's coffee was the hottest in the industry. That McDonald's coffee temperature was on the "knee of the curve" where a few degrees made the difference between a minor burn and a 3rd degree burn. The women received 3rd degree burns and had to go to a hospital. By pushing their coffee temperature to an extreme, well beyond industry practice, McDonald's created a hazard. The lawsuit is not so stupid in that context.
The case sited in this story does sound stupid, but I would like to hear the whole story before I judge.
I think the decision is right, but not that it had to be reached in this way. Domain registrations should result in the minimally required DNS-records, unless stated otherwise. If I want a domain for emails, I don't want to find out that someone has put up a webpage which most likely doesn't represent me. These announcements may get into search engines before I get around to putting my pages up. If there are links to the provider on the announcement page, they get free page-rank and my name becomes associated with content which I did not choose to link to. More severe consequences are not unthinkable.
So does this mean that once a house is sold, the realtor must immediately take down their sign rather than leaving it up for a week advertising their name with the "SOLD" sticker across it?
I did it for them on my new house. Nobody gets to advertise on my property. I wouldn't let my barber carve his logo into my scalp, either.
Register.Com's 'coming soon' page is a garish, crowded, visual assault. Nobody would want that thing on a web site that they paid for.
BN
First of all, the blatant advertising on YOUR domain is wrong, then the sorry ass nature of it with the tons of popups and such is distasteful.
Second, for that "coming soon" page to show up, they MUST have propagated an IP address into the DNS servers. This suggests they could have just as easily propagated YOUR IP address instead of theirs. Which gives them incentive to delay your processing.
Thrid, if they received ANY revenue off the advertising on your domain, aren't you entitled?
Funny, I make that the fault of the people for allowing such a law to exist. Change it if you don't like it.
Nice idea, but in the real world lawyers have a lot more influence in shaping laws than regular people do.
Having been living in the UK for 5 years now, I see a lot more of the US-style ads encouraging people to think of reasons to sue somebody. It's a process that feeds itself, the more successful they are, the more they are able to twist the system to suit their needs.
-- Sigs are for losers
"Thrid, if they received ANY revenue off the advertising on your domain, aren't you entitled?
"
Maybe you already received this amount in the form of discounted registration prices.
i myself use godaddy, though. http://www.godaddy.com
This is totally wrong.
ICANN requires that every registrar have a transfer agreement with another registrar in place in case it goes out of business.
GANDI used to have more about this, but it still has a little: GANDI FAQ.