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Experience with Fighting Domain Farming
Lost_my_regs writes "I had a .com domain name relevant only to me, no legal trademark, registered and hosted at a provider that went bust. When attempting to re-host the domain I discovered, to my unpleasant surprise, that the domain is now registered by a domain farming company (name removed). My question is: Is there any way to claim back my domain?"
I longer words, if you are prepared to devote vast amounts of your time and effort then there is a very slim chance of your success.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...kill them, wait two years and reclaim what is yours.
So, make it worth their time to continue clogging up the internet?
They may not take the 100.00 offer right away. They'll probably come back with a ridiculous counter offer. Keep offering the 100, and they'll eventually take it.
Sue, sue everybody. Sue the now defunct company that lost your domain. Sue the company that bought your domain. Sue the owners of said companies directly. Sue their parents, their wives, and their children. Sue their pets. Sue everybody!
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
The domain now has no value to another as they cannot use or sell it without violating the trademark. You also have a much stronger position in the various appeal processes.
Let me guess, your last name is mylastname? Unique, definitely, but unfortunate I'd say.
I would say start lowering it. They come back with $5,000: come back with $50.
Those people are out for easy money. Easy money should be peanuts or less.
Be prepared to walk so that they'll lose and they'll lose because the domain name is only good to the person who's responsible for this article. Meaning, after they're registration time is up, they'll abandon it themselves. Paying them is to only get it back sooner.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Even so, I'd try everything I could before resorting to paying the leeches. It's just too distasteful for words.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Domain farming causes me no small amount of anger in principle, but it recently bit me, as well. Due to problems with my registrar (joker.com--which after years of service without complaint I now would recommend NO ONE use), a domain I managed for some one else was snagged by a domain farmer.
This was upsetting enough by itself, but what really caused me to become enraged is that the same company that bought it and sold it back to me [i]IS A LICENSED REGISTRAR[/i]. Granted, they do it under a couple of different names, but it's quite clearly all the same operation, or at least willing co-operation. The fact that this sort of thing is allowed to go on shows that either ICANN allows it or is completely inept in regulating it. The only question is whether they are incompetent or swayed by money at some point in the process.
Sadly, as long as pretend-to-do-no-evil giant Google keeps encouraging and rewarding these shady practices, us regular guys are utterly powerless. It would take a tremendous concerted effort to outvote Google with our pitiful dollars.
.com version -- wasn't commercializing it in anyway. Let the registration lapse and it got vacuumed up by a domain farmer. I just registered the .net version. Then after a year, after the farmer probably lost money on it, the .com domain was free again and I re-registered it for a longer period with (what I hope is) a more reliable registrar, Yahoo.
I agree this is the crux of the problem. I wish Google would move against domain farming, but as parent points out, they're the industry leader.
Had a similar thing happen to me with a domain which I was using much like the OP. I had the
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
I have a fair amount of experience with such situations, mostly from helping various clients, and in my experience it largely depends on how it happened. Did you simply allow the domain to expire and then someone else snatched it up? If so, you are pretty much just plain out of luck. If it is not a pre-existing trademark of yours, then you really have no basis for trying to reclaim it under ICANN dispute resolution policies. If the new registrant somehow took control of it under false pretense - like submitted falsified statements and/or documentation to dispute the domain, then you most certainly have grounds to file your own dispute. If that's the case, then you should initiate a dispute via the registrar you normally use for your domain registrations. If it doesn't really fall into those extremes, then an ICANN dispute is probably not going to lead anywhere and your only option would be some kind of legal action, but that is not likely to have any different kind of outcome either.
Wait. Don't contact them. Don't make any waves.
Often - very often - a domain farmer picks up the domain for just a week or so (no matter how long the WHOIS says it's really registered for) - and waits to see if the pay-per-click ads generate enough revenue to make it worth keeping. So often the best thing you can do is...nothing. Don't visit the site (generates traffic), don't contact them (tells them they have a chance of milking you for $), don't do anything - just sit and wait. Often the name will get dropped and another farmer will pick it up immediately - but if you're patient and check back in with the WHOIS, you should eventually see it free again for long enough to grab it.
This may sound ridiculous, but it's how the domain name economy is currently working, courtesy of weak ICAAN rules. Make it work in your favor - you want that one name, but they want 100,000 that generate enough revenue to make up the low ($3.50/year? can't remember) ICAAN fees necessary to hold on to it. (They know WIPO arbitration is going to cost you $1500+legal fees, so in that route the numbers are on their side.)
This has worked with the .com versions of two different domain names held by non-profit clients of mine just this year. Good luck.
Names are registered with Registrars. Hosting is done at ISPs. Are you saying your now-defunct ISP where the site was hosted was also a Registrar?
If that was the case, when your site was registered was it in your name or the ISP's name? Who was Technical contact, you or the ISP?
If it was in the ISPs name and they went defunct and were bought, then you're screwed.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Back around 2000, my domain name, www.sideshowfreak.com, was at Netcom, and they somehow managed to drop it in the middle of a back-end transfer. I found out two weeks later when my emails stopped coming.
I did what you suggested, asked nicely, offered to double his transfer expenses, explained that I was setting it up for some friends doing a circus.
He was a total and complete jackass. Hurling obscenities, suggesting unreasonable prices ($100,000). I gave up. It wasn't worth the effort or the agony. I did manage to call his mom, who had the phone number that the account was registered to - the guy was in college and didn't have a phone. The poor woman sounded like she had had this conversation dozens of times. "Please, I don't know why my son is doing this, can you speak to him and ask him to stop, I'm getting so many calls, he's just out of control..." Eventually he anonomized the whois.
That domain name is STILL hosted by a domain name farmer - don't know if it's still him. I expect whoever it is uses some metric of number of hits to determine how valuable a name is, so listing it here might bump up its value.
Domain name farming should be killed. If you're actually using a domain, fine. But if you're just holding it waiting for someone to pay an unreasonably high price, someone with a legit claim (say, the previous owner) should be able to snipe it back.
If the domain was owned by you, and you haven't signed any forms to transfer it, then you should ask your registar to please show you the document signed by you that approves of the transfer.
If they can't show it, then threaten to sue and then sue.
Registars need a signed transfer document from the owner to transfer domains. However if the domain was never on your name anyway then your shit out of luck.
A few months back this even got stricter because domain squaters where sending out transfer forms to companies with a bullshit letter that they should sign it. (it still amazes me that that actually worked) So now a days you can also lock your domain name, which means that before the domain can get transfered even more hoops have to be jumped. And i believe depending on where you are, theres a quarantine time, before the name can be released again.
This account seems somehow wrong. Did you leave out some material information from the story?
Did this happen to you on a yearly boundary? If not, and if you had a registration on the domain that was good for a year, why couldn't you just go to another domain provider and identify yourself for a transfer? Was the account in good standing? Am I confused, or is this information not a matter of public record that extends beyond the end of your term of registration? Is the registrar at which you bought it the only source of record for such information? That would sound terribly dangerous as a single-point-of-failure for the web in the case of any kind of disaster, much less bankruptcy.
Additionally, did you get no notice? Did you just come in one day and find that your domain no longer responded and that all domains at that registrar were up for grabs? If so, that again seems very weird. I thought a bankruptcy required some court intervention at least for the purpose of asset divvying, and the notion that the registered domains were not an asset that required deliberative action seems odd to me. Possible, certainly--I'm not a lawyer and don't know the process. But odd nevertheless.
Did you act at the moment of the bankruptcy--or did you wait? That is, was your problem the result of the bankruptcy or your failure to act quickly? I realize these issues are probably sad and embarrassing, and I'm not meaning to rub salt in a wound. But Slashdot articles inform people about how the world works, and in exchange for the attention and good advice you offer, I think it's good to offer a complete accounting of the story.
Are you sure you're not leaving out some information? Perhaps the left-out information is not relevant to the question you were asking, but implicit in the question you were asking is alerting people to something that might happen to them. And I'd like to understand better the process by which this could happen to someone else so that we all, as a community, might understand if there's a process issue that needs fixing to assure proactively, rather than reactively, that this shouldn't happen in the future.
Sorry about your problem, btw. Losing a domain happened to a friend of mine by the more usual means of just failing to pay for it for a while. Someone scooped it up and they were left paying a couple hundred dollars to get it back. I agree that's a nuisance, but it does argue for keeping payments up to date on things you care about.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Lets see:
Real Estate - you can buy it, improve it, sell it on to someone who is unable to improve it themselves
Stocks - you buy it and a company gets an investment to spend and improve their business
Gold - meh, we don't need it, everything is based on 1s and 0s. No-one misses it if you 'buy' some and it remains sitting in some bank vault somewhere
Coins/stamps - Millions of almost identical ones. To most people they don't have much value or use.
Art - it was designed to be collected and displayed
Domains - squatters (which is what they are) don't improve it after they buy it. In real estate terms they leave it to rot with minimal attention and invest nothing in it. In terms of stock then no-one (except the registrar) sees the benefit of an investment, and they're getting bulk purchasing so it isn't as much as it could be. In terms of gold then people actually need domain names, since the only other alternative is IP addresses and folders that aren't portable. In terms of coins and stamps then each is unique and they have value to the masses that want to visit. In terms of art then they were created to access a website, not a load of adverts, and they certainly weren't designed to be collected.
So I think there might be one or two differences there.
A friend missed renewing her domain and it was snatched up instantly by a farmer who wanted her to make an offer to reclaim it. it was definitely a unique name that would be of no use to anyone who didn't have her (very unusual) name and her line of work.
A lawyer friend sent a letter to the new owner, basically saying the obvious: you have no use for this domain, and you need to give it back or we'll come after you.
The company returned the domain to her instantly, with apologies for their "mistake".
I'm sure the letter arriving on stationary from a huge, powerful international law firm didn't hurt.
Anyway, what they are doing is obviously cybersquatting, which is illegal. And if they're trying to make a quick buck here and there, they certainly can't afford to defend themselves against thousands of lawsuits.
there is only the door, the door, the door.