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Domain Name Sold for Millions
Luke PiWalker writes "The infamous and controversial domain Sex.com has officially been sold to Boston-based Escom LLC for a reported $14 million. Sex.com owner Gary Kremen was unavailable for comment, but a source from Kremen's company, Grant Media, told XBiz that sales for the famous domain name will still be handled through Grant Media's San Francisco offices. While other terms of the acquisition remain unknown, XBiz was able to locate information on the deal through a company called InternetRealEstate.com, which shares office space in Boston with Domain Name Acquisition Group (DNAG), a company that was involved in a lawsuit surrounding the Sex.com domain in September."
There's some background on the domain name here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com
That is called Domain Hijacking. It is actually a common practice. It even happened to Sex.com
A guy named Gary Kremen was apparently one of the first cybersquatters in the early 90's when domains were free. A guy named Stephen Cohen then hijacked Sex.com, and Kremens sued him:
"In November 2000, at the end of a three-year legal battle, a federal judge ruled that Stephen Cohen had stolen the domain by forging a letter from Kremen's company to Network Solutions. Cohen was ordered to return Sex.com to Kremen and pay him $65 million in damages. (Cohen appealed, and in June of this year, the US Supreme Court declined to hear his case.) In the meantime, Cohen had fled the country, so all Kremen got as compensation was this California mansion and a derelict house on the US-Mexico border. Even so, Kremen figured he'd found his winning lottery ticket. Under Cohen, Sex.com had been taking in $500,000 a month selling banner ads to other online porn sites."
ZEN is a prime number in base-36
...And there's no link to sex.com in the story? Good grief.
qntm.org