Sex.com Settles Case Against VeriSign

netcentr writes "A press release on CircleID has announced that the owner of the Sex.com domain name today has got 'a final settlement with VeriSign (formerly Network Solutions, Inc.), concluding a six-year legal fight that set several important precedents for the future of the Internet. After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted Sex.Com a sweeping victory that held VeriSign/Network Solutions, Inc. (collectively "VeriSign") strictly responsible for mishandling the famous domain name, Sex.Com and VeriSign have settled Sex.Com's lawsuit against VeriSign.' Gary Kremen was awarded a $65 million judgment against Cohen for stealing the domain name, which the U.S. Supreme Court declined to overturn on June 12, 2003."

Comments

One in a million

[lukewarmfusion]

Ah... good thing they got that taken care of. I was so starved for pr0n for the last six years.

Really - like there aren't enough of these sites out there?

Re:One in a million

[corbettw]

Well, if anything that just proves the validity of any judgement. Back when the domain was first hijacked, there weren't a bazillion different porn sites. Imagine how much more money the guy could've earned being one of the first out the gate, if Verisign/Network Solutions hadn't screwed the pooch?

Re:One in a million

[tbase]

So, by that logic, is it ok for me to illegally hijack the expedia.com domain and make millions from it because there's no shortage of travel sites? Have you been too busy looking at pr0n to realize that Network Solutions handed over this multi-million dollar domain name without verifying the authenticity of the request? The victim (yeah, you heard me) will likely never see a dime of the $65 million settlement against the guy who stole it - shouldn't he have some recourse against the company that handed him the keys?

Re:One in a million

[justMichael]

...hadn't screwed the pooch?

If that's what he was selling, maybe it's a good thing they hijacked his domain to save us. ;)

Yay!

[TWX]

So the courts finally come out and say that sex should be on the internet!

Millions of smelly UNIX administrators breathe a sigh of relief.

Re:Yay!

[vwjeff]

Millions of smelly UNIX administrators breathe a sigh of relief.

You don't have to be a UNIX admin to be smelly you insensitive clod. Oh, wait...nevermind.

Oh lord here comes a slew of bad slashdot jokes...

[notbob]

Oh well $65 million for SEX (.com) has to be a new record...

Even our former mayor of Cincinnati, didn't write a Check that.. good ol' Jerry Springer.

SEX (.com) has to be the most successful prostitution of a domain name yet :)

Astounding

[Yi Ding]

Yeah, it completely astounds me how Verisign was unable to write a line of code which would have given the guy back his domain, which was clearly stolen from him.

Re:Astounding

[Ravensfire]

Hang on - you wanted them to ADMIT their mistake, without a court order? Right ....

Good grief - what hill have you been living under?!?

-- Ravensfire

Re:Astounding

[Daniel Dvorkin]

There was obviously no technical reason Verisign couldn't transfer the domain back to its rightful owner. They make have said there was, but they were, of course, lying. (And, on a tangential rant: the liars at Verisign, like all the other liars at big corporations who routinely lie to cover their fuckups, should go to prison. But they won't.) There is a pathological desire on the part of these corporate pricks to avoid admitting ever that they made a mistake, so they come up with bullshit excuses.

Re:Astounding

[archen]

This is Verisign we're talking about here. It would be a miricle if they could write a line of code that tells them if the sky is blue.

Re:Astounding

[jjohnson]

In the mid-late 90s, domain registrars were explicitly avoiding fixing their mistakes on legal counsel's advice, namely that to fix a mistake was to admit liability for that mistake, and to admit liability for that mistake was to open oneself up to damages in the millions. Thus, they all took the legal position that they weren't responsible for anything they did until it was proven otherwise.

Stupid from a common sense point of view, smart from a business point of view. I can think of a lot of domain name fuckups that, could the owner have sued, would have sunk the registrars. As it is, they've avoided huge lawsuits for the last 8 years.

It took a domain name with the potential money behind it of sex.com to push it all the way through the courts to the current situation.

Re:Astounding

[glitch23]

Good grief - what hill have you been living under?!?

Capitol Hill

Good

[BoomerSooner]

Screw verisign, they suck. Without their monopoly they wouldn't have been able to extort people and give the shittiest service ever.

I hope it's for the full $65 Million.

Re:Good

[DAldredge]

I see you have never had to deal with the goverment.

Just wait.

They make vs cs look perfect.

Re:Good

[nilloc]

From what I read, Verisign settle the case the original owner. The $65 million award is aganist the guy who stole it. The article didn't say how much Verisign had to paid.

o.O

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our rightful sex.com overlords

2nd post?

[Anonymous Coward]

VeriSign is bad news(for years thay would not let you put "fu*k" in your domain name)

The base VeriSign site:
http://www.recallverisign.com

Check out this page by GoDaddy.com about VeriSign: https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/PressReleases/inter net_battle.asp?isc=&se=%2B&from%5Fapp=

Re:2nd post?

[callipygian-showsyst]

Well, of course you can't put "f*ck" in a domain name! Asterisk ("*") is not a valid character for a domain name. You need to read the RFC.

Aren't there enough?

[Fubar411]

There are NEVER ENOUGH!

To quote Will Ferrel's Neal Diamond impression, "To quench my insatiable appetite for barely legal porno."

Re:Aren't there enough?

[EpsCylonB]

Or to quote friends...

"If they took all the porn off the internet I'm pretty sure there would only be one website left, and it would called bring back the porn"

Re:Aren't there enough?

[Finuvir]

Scrubs actually.

Just wait...

[radd0]

until George Michael catches wind of this.

I notice

[platypibri]

there is no such battle over intellect.com

Why so much

[Teclis]

$65 Million? Are you telling me that's the amount of profit lost? Or that's the amount it cost to run the case through the courts..

I bet all the lawyers involved are smiling, You do know they aren't that stupid. The case could have been settled 5 years ago, but then how could lawyers make any money?

Good to see the U.S. Justice system at work.

Re:Why so much

[mehtajr]

$25 million of the award was punitive damages, so presumably, the other $40 million was compensatory (lost profits) and legal fees (probably mostly legal fees).

Interestingly, those damages were awarded by a judge, not a jury. Here's a link. I would've expected a smaller judgement from the bench.

Re:Why so much

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't doubt that the amount lost during the years that Kremen was denied use of the domain name reached into the millions. After all, this was 1995, the start of the web boom. I don't remember how many years Cohen ran that site, but I can just imagine the $$$ rolling in.

And as a side note, since Cohen fled the country, Kremen will not see a dime from Cohen anyway.

PDF Mirror just in case

[MrRuslan]

http://www.narvakitchens.com/CircleID.pdf

Re:Blank Page?

[DaHat]

You're not the only one... it acts like a page is being Dled, and a view source reveals page code... just no text is being displayed in IE, Firefox seems to work, shame I'm still an IE person.

Next on the agenda

[Otter]

...which the U.S. Supreme Court declined to overturn on June 12, 2003...

Next up on the agenda for Rehnquist and company: goatse.cx v. .cx

I bet they thought being on the Court was going to involve dignity. OK, Thomas probably learned otherwise before he got his robe but the others likely did.

Baaah

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanted to register www.sex.orgy a loonnggg time back. But they wouldn't give me the extra 'y'.

How much did they settle for?

[billstewart]

The press release doesn't say whether it was the full $65million or some smaller amount, or how long Verisign would have to pay. Google News has pointers to one or two versions of the press release, plus Slashdot (:-), plus a Wired article that has the press release but also speculated that the settlement is probably a lot less than the full boat, and some comments on Kremen's attempts to track down the assets of Cohen the name thief.

Re:How much did they settle for?

[red floyd]

The $65M judgement was against Cohen, who stole the domain. This is Kremen's suit against VeriSign for being idiots (for handing over the domain without verification) and dickheads (for refusing to do anything about it).

Re:How much did they settle for?

[billstewart]

Yes, but at least one of the court cases (I think the CA Supreme court one, but it's been a while since I read them) said that Cohen and Verisign were jointly liable, so if Kremen couldn't collect from Cohen (who took the money and ran), they could collect it from Verisign and leave Verisign stuck trying to catch Cohen and any of his assets.

Finally.

[7Ghent]

Well, it's great that the good guys finally won and defeated the spectre of Verisign's vast incompentence and utter lack of responsibility, but SIX YEARS? I don't even want to think about the legal fees. There's definitely something wrong with our justice system when a stright-forward case of theft takes SIX years and millions of dollars to successfully prosecute.

Re:Finally.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's great that the good guys finally won and defeated the spectre of Verisign's vast incompentence and utter lack of responsibility, but SIX YEARS?

That is not so surprising when you consider that the very core of (then)Verisign's domain name registration service was being questioned in court. If the registrant can't trust that the registrar will protect their name, what rightful-thinking registrant would use that registrar?

There's definitely something wrong with our justice system when a stright-forward case of theft takes SIX years and millions of dollars to successfully prosecute.

According to the press release, the case against Verisign was not for theft but for conversion, which is (basically) the unauthorized assumption and exercise of the rights of ownership over property belonging to someone else. The case reaches well past Verisign and the particular domain name owner; it stands for the proposition that a domain name registrant has the legal right of ownership in their domain name and that interference with that right by another (including the domain name registrar) is legally actionable.

I interviewed there.

[Kenja]

I interviewed at sex.com or as they like to be known "deerfield communications". Place was run out of the basment of an abandoned building. Not realy what I was looking for in a job.

The thief made much more money

[billstewart]

Kremen _was_ first out of the gate, and had the domain to himself for most of a year before it got ripped off. He hadn't done anything particularly profitable with it, which was part of how Cohen was able to rip it off without being noticed for a while. Cohen was the one who built it into a valuable property, though much of that was lucky timing on his part, stealing it before the web boom really took off, but it wasn't likely to ever be worth $40M if Kremen had kept owning it.

But still Netsol not only shouldn't have let themselves get fooled, they should have fixed the problem promptly when they were notified about it.

Re:The thief made much more money

[Elbow Macaroni]

They didn't get fooled. They probably outright stole the domain like I've seen them do many, many times.

Once they did steal one of my domains and then sold it back to me for $1,200 under another company name that was owned by Verisign.

Verisign does what they want to do and have been doing it for way too long and getting away with murder.

Re:Offended

[andy666]

This isn't a story about sex, it is a story about the internet. Unless you find the supreme court sexy...

Re:Offended

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Shut up
2. Make me a sandwich

Re:Offended

[LordKazan]

My girlfriend and I are both technically feminists - it's actually illogical for a feminist to condemn porn. Why? Sure some porn is negative, but saying ALL porn is, is saying that it's impossible for a woman to enjoy her sexuality. You are perpetuating the very double standards you are trying to destroy.

Re:what a case, what a name

[Mateito]

> Goooo Sex.com

or "How to get yourself sued by Sex.com AND Google in one easy domain registration"

Court of Appeal Decision

[David Hume]

You can find the decision by the United States Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit at:
Kremen, et al. v. Online Classifieds Inc., et al. (pdf warning)

To get the html version, paste this url:

http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/ 99 9D1D5B0D734B6088256D6D0078CB88/$file/0115899.pdf?o penelement

into the Adobe PDF Conversion Page.

Re:Court of Appeal Decision

[bendelo]

Or you could include the form data in the URL

Re:GPLed pr0n

[Metex]

sorry 5 beers makes my spelling horrible

A phone call? I wonder

[burgburgburg]

My favorite part of all this is that "at a time when the queue for domain names was over four weeks", all it took to commit this crime was "Cohen simply picked up the phone, asked for and was granted the Sex.Com domain name immediately".

Am I the only one who suspects that there was a lot more than just a phone call behind this? That people high up in Verisign must have been conspiring with Cohen? Why else go through so much to keep obviously stolen property from it's rightful owner? Why lie to the courts about a supposedly forged letter if you weren't covering for something much worse?

Re:A phone call? I wonder

[SnappleMaster]

Yes, it must be a conspiracy.

Remember, if they're really out to get you, you aren't paranoid.

As to why they didn't fess up, I read an interesting post above. Basically registrars were not fixing mistakes/thefts to avoid admitting legal responsibility. Sounds more plausible than a conspiracy to me.

State Action + Converstion = takings

[pdcryan]

Very interesting.

Not all of the pieces of the puzzle are in place yet but it looks like VeriSign is finally being pegged as a state actor. What does that mean? Well, all of those annoying parts of the constitution that apply to governments, but not to private parties... might apply to them (little things... like... due process maybe?).

Further - if domain names are property (which is contrary to some lot of previous court precedent - partially based on the idea that domain names are only protected in so much as they are trademarks, which generally cannot be transferred without transferring the good will of the company behind the trademark) VeriSign has some further problems. When they bumble these things, not only are they violating the domain owners due process rights - but it might be a constitutional "taking" - requiring compensation.

Hopefully finding that VeriSign is a state actor, and that there is a property interest in a domain name - will be the final nail in SiteFinder's coffin (which essentially would be conversion of all of the unregistered domain names).

Anybody interested in being the .net and .com domain registry? I have a feeling ICANN might be looking to fill some positions soon.

Re:State Action + Converstion = takings

[poot_rootbeer]

Well, all of those annoying parts of the constitution that apply to governments, but not to private parties... might apply to them (little things... like... due process maybe?).

If the FCC (a state actor if there ever was one) can still arbitrary levy fines on Howard and Bono (and the companies that give them airtime) for incidents that may have occurred several years ago without due process, what hope do we have that Verisign will ever be held to the proper standards?

Slashdot Comedy Cop Alert! Re:One in a million

[sharper56]

Excuse me, a proper Slashdot retort would have included some passing reference to the act of masterbation when talking about internet porn.

example:
No, I can surf with only one hand.

In future, please try to follow the Slashdot comedy guidelines!

Re:Slashdot Comedy Cop Alert! Re:One in a million

[JudgeFurious]

That's "No, I can't surf with only one hand you insensative clod!"

In this case use of the classic "Profit!!!" seems mandatory but also easy just like an "All your base" reference.

A "Soviet Russia" or maybe a "Beowulf cluster" comment done well though would really be nice.

I mean, as long as we're following the SCG's and all.

Re:Slashdot Comedy Cop Alert! Re:One in a million

[Mr Guy]

At Slashdot, Anonymous Cowards make your profits for you, you insensitive clod.

Smelly UNIX

[lildogie]

I've got to get that distro!

Sex.com?

[bfg9000]

Why should we care? This is obviously not something that will ever affect us geeks. Now, HabitualSelfPleasure.com, *there's* News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters.

Re:maybe I'm missing something...

[Anita Coney]

Because most companies do not have 65 million dollars in cash laying around. Rather than the plaintiff spending years garnisheeing and collecting on a bunch of properties, it's much easier to reach a figure with the loser and take it. A very large percentage of cases settle post-judgment.

Landmark case

[Audacious]

It is also a landmark case because now we know who's had sex and who hasn't.

(I'll just go back to playing my video games now. You know - the ones with the simulated sex. :-P )

Was Beelzebub the Judge?

[wonkavader]

I guess it makes sense that Verisign would wind up in the Ninth Circle. Oh, wait. That was Ninth Circuit.

I worked with Steve Cohen weeks after he stole sex

[hmhoek]

I had just started at a small recruiting shop and he was around in various unspecified capacities. We started talking one night and he was really excited about showing me how he owned sex.com. He did a whois, which had his name, then logged into the sex.com servers and poked around a little. He then bragged about the cashflow and the offers to buy from Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler.

He also asked all the secretaries to pose naked, used the company phones to call Nevada brothels for business advice and other shady activities.

I was later deposed as a witness for a sexual harassment case against the company because of his behavior (he was not an employee but rather an acquaintence of the owner) and the behavior of other sales people. The company's attorneys were in the process of searching for him at that time, which was around 2000 or 2001.

I can't wait for him to finally get caught. He reminds me of Robert Vesco; he's probably funding Al Queda or Russian prostitution rings or something now.

I met the thief

[gbulmash]

Oddly enough, when I was a salesperson at the Circuit City in Huntington Beach, CA, I sold a VCR to Steve Cohen, the guy who stole sex.com.

This was within a couple of months of him getting the domain. He was bragging about how he owned it and how he'd already been offered a million dollars to sell it, but he was going to hold on to it because he thought it was worth a lot more.

Guess it was.

- Greg

Re:maybe I'm missing something...

[nacturation]

No, that's not it. The $65M judgment was from last year in a case against Cohen, who stole the domain. The article doesn't say what Verisign settled for.

Re:Expires 2012 - Still Stuck With Verisign?

[akaiONE]

If you had bothered to paste the first part of the whois you would display the fact that Kremen can not change the domain himself anymore:

Domain Name: SEX.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: http://www.networksolutions.com
Name Server: NS2.PERSIANKITTY.COM
Name Server: NS1.SEX.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 03-dec-2003
Creation Date: 18-oct-1995
Expiration Date: 17-oct-2012

I guess it's just going to sit like that until NSI decides that it's time for the real owner to have control back.

How The Grinch Stole sex.com flash cartoon

[adzoox]

How The Grinch Stole Sex.com - a very funny flash cartoon with a little background on the story and the legal matter.