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The History of Sex.com, the Most Contested Domain On the Internet
sarahnaomi writes On its face, sex.com looks like a no-frills Pinterest for porn, but behind the site lies an ongoing grudge match between the man who invented online dating and a con artist who stole the crown jewel of the internet out from under him. The history of the domain is well documented, with two books and dozens of articles written on the subject. It was first registered in 1994 by Gary Kremen, the entrepreneur who founded Match.com and was savvy enough to buy up several generic domains, including jobs.com and housing.com, in the early days of the internet.
dude A registered sex.com
dude B fucked girl @ registry company of dude A and used further tricks to get sex.com
dude B made millions with the domain name
dudes C and D founded google, resulting in loss of "random visitors"
dude A got sex.com back from B through court descision, demanded $64 million
dude B didn't pay, fled to mexico, was turned over, spent time in prison, still didnt pay until today
I scooped it up in '33 for a song, then was able to retire to Buenos Aires on the profits!
Dating and sex? You sure came to the right website for that!
Link is NSFW.
Also, even if we take "online" as a euphemism to mean "web" and ignore UseNet singles newsgroups and who knows what else before that, the article makes no mention of Dan Bender, who launched American Singles on Feburary 14, 1995.
So why are we going over it again?
the best thing to do is cut all your losses
you will never get anything from someone who resists all attempts at a constructive life
Kremen needs to just walk away. yes, he deserves much from this douchebag Cohen
but it begins to define your life, your identity, and your legacy, if you stay attached to such a piece of shit, even just antagonistically
cut your losses, move on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sex.com is also the most contested domain, in my pants!
Dude, it's the closest I've been in years so shut up and don't ruin this for most of us!!!
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
I find it highly interesting that an individual could just decide not to pay and a judge would just quit trying to make him.
I mean, when someone like you or me doesn't pay their bills, just not paying AND keeping all my assets aren't options, either, are they?
Also the thought comes to mind: At what point in time has the law failed you enough that, ethically speaking, you're well in your rights to just go bash the other guy's head in to at least get some satisfaction?
No surprise ... the link is blocked by the company firewall !
I shrivel up at the sight of naked flesh. The only thing that will induce my erection is reading kernel change logs.
The judge should have kept him in prison for contempt of court.
If you will not respect the laws of the land, then you should be locked up. Anything else is a recipe for lawlessness.
We don't have our wealth stashed in numbered bank accounts ... although I think if it was the IRS which wanted the money they'd have it by now.
Despite Kremen having layered and sued successfully, the ass-hat Cohen just fled with the money. This is why libertranism cannot work : bad guys can have a policy of burned bridge after getting the money, and good luck then for your grievance.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
There is just no fucking around with sex.
Cohen's a con man, he knows how to hide assets
you and i have a house a job and a bank account. in our names. simple and plain
this guy has accounts in friend's names, accounts in countries with opaque banking practices, houses owned by trusts or shell corporations or family members, etc
to liquidate your assets or my assets would be easy, any forensic accountant could do it in 15 minutes. because we're financially transparent, honest and straightforward people. but some douchebag who tries very hard to squirrel away their assets can make it a full time job just tracking it all down
well, from the article:
this sounds very close to "oops, poor guy got shot dead by accident"
so either Kremen has thought about the possibility of doing the guy in, or, at the very least, Kremen doesn't mind how his actions might endanger Cohen (i'm not saying he should)
lowlifes in seedy areas with sketchy financial assets and the need to avoid the law often wind up dead and robbed. hard to tell the difference between that happening and being accidental, or arranged
which is why it is good to be you and me with our boring plain finances. when your finances are squirrely, squirrely things can happen to you. but if someone messes with you and i, we can complain and get justice. the question of who is in the right and who is in the wrong isn't very grey
black and white absolutes don't exist in this world. but when it comes to your finances, it's best to be as close to black and white as possible. or you can get fucked with
the best target for con men and thieves, is other con men and thieves
because there's no honor in that world. pure dog eat dog
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Contempt of court in a civil case can only be remedial, not punitive. If the judge determined that no amount of jail time will compel Cohen to pay up, he was obligated to let him go. That IS the "law of the land".
Have you ever made a post that *didn't * sound like the ranting ravings of an unmedicated lunatic?
You'd think Kremen would just have the guy kidnapped and torture the info out of him.
1. Cohen probably doesn't have that much, and it will probably cost more to do what you suggest than anything you can recover
3. by acting with such impunity, you can get in trouble with the law. never mind blackmail by shady thugs. once you gain the attention of certain low like characters, and you demonstrate to them a brutality and mendacity they recognize in themselves, they get their hooks into you, and they don't let go
better to stay clean
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The history of the domain is well documented, with two books and dozens of articles written on the subject.
Coming soon, Woody Allen's first new comedy in decades: "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About sex.com But Were Afraid to Ask".
One interesting footnote is that one of the legal team on Kremen's side was Charles Carreon who later gained notoriety through the The Oatmeal and FunnyJunk legal dispute.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
UK (technically English) libel laws mean foreigners often pull this trick on British enemies (or enemies who have fled to Britain for their physical security).
For example suppose a Mexican guy knows some awful stuff about a rich guy in Russia. A Russian newspaper bravely publishes it. Six weeks later the newspaper editor has a accident. But that's not enough for our Russian. He hires some guys to have the Mexican beaten and killed. The Mexican has an inside line and has fled to the UK. He's safe right? Well, physically, probably. Russian gangsters can't easily have someone bumped off in the UK. But the Russian immediately sues, saying the Mexican lied about him. In a Russian newspaper, in Russian. That's OK say the UK courts. If you can find one person who says they read that newspaper in England, we'll get you justice. So some nobody is paid to show up and say yeah, they get the paper imported, they read it in Russian. Our Mexican must pay lawyers to defend him in court, to help prove it's all true.
Two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars of fees down the line, the court says "Well, seems everything about this Russian was true". Great. "So, we'll have the defendants costs paid please". Ah, the Russian guy says in a letter he cannot pay, he is very sorry. His English lawyers, very handsomely paid, were given all their money up front it turns out. Alas the Russian has no assets in the UK to be liquidated. So sorry. Too bad for the now bankrupt Mexican. He's physically safe, but also half way around the world and destitute.
The best available fixes for this are -
1. Get rid of these stupid libel laws. English libel law only for legitimate English libel cases.
2. Non-citizens must show up or they lose immediately. If they can't pay, we can lock them up and see whether it turns out they "forgot" about a few million dollars they had somewhere.
3. Courts should be able to take the money off the lawyers if they suspect this swindle was deliberate. Too bad if you don't trust your clients to pay the court then don't take them as clients.
I can think of very few things that upset me more than domain squatters. Up there with child molesters and corrupt politicians.
Because the author is too lazy to do the research doesn't mean the guy was savvy. It didn't used to cost a thing to register so all you needed to do to register hundreds of them was be a selfish prick. It didn't occur to most of us to register domains we didn't need. Or perhaps the author is equating 'savvy' and 'selfish prick'?
there are plenty of douchebags in this world with a self-declared and delusional, entitled sense of impunity
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
backward, i mean.
I don't even wonder why online dating sites' popularity has increadibly grown up. People are always interested in relationships, guys look for girls and visa versa. To tell the truth, I spend so much time online, too... I tried tonns of dating sources, I used Tinder and Ehow, and finally stopped at this one https://kovla.com . I am afraid, in nearly future online dating comes foreground kind of relationships...
Best available fix is to require an in trust fund to repay all defendants legal costs if cleared.
Link is NSFW.
The link is NSFW because it shows a girl's bum in a bikini? Or because it has "sexual relationship" in the text?
How many cities allow men and women to be topless in public and we are still worried about seeing women's swimwear?
~~
When you are as rich as Kremen, whether you call it vengeance and/or revenge Cohen only needs to slip up once and his assets will be toast.
'if i knew then what i know now' and 'if i just had some extra money back then' categories...
you would have snatched up domains by the hundreds or thousands way back when.. i would have.. and regardless of how you feel about squatters today, you all would have done it and you know it (and wouldn't feel the same way about them today either)
It doesn't matter what other cities allow. I meant NSFW in the most literal sense -- whether it is safe to click the link at work (in the U.S., since as the Slashdot FAQ says, it is a U.S.-based site).