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Green Bay Packers and Microsoft Win Domain Name Fight After Family Sought Cash, Tickets and Tablets (geekwire.com)
theodp writes: Last fall, Microsoft and the Green Bay Packers announced a $10 million partnership to build TitletownTech, "an innovation center focused on developing and advancing scalable, technology-enabled ventures," which aims to bring an economic boost to the area near Lambeau Field (Microsoft President Brad Smith hails from the region). Unfortunately for them, they failed to secure their venture's namesake domain name ahead of time. GeekWire reports on the fate of a Wisconsin family that was sitting on the coveted titletowntech.com domain name and offered to give it up in exchange for $750,000 cash, 8 lifetime Packers season tickets, 2 parking passes, and 8 Microsoft Surface Pro tablets (with lifetime MS-Office licenses). The family said the admittedly-ridiculous demand wasn't meant to be taken seriously but was intended to send a message after they received a suspicious $5,000 buyout offer from an anonymous "service" that the Packers engaged to try to recover the fumbled domain. Not amused, Green Bay Packers, Inc. flexed its legal muscle, filing a domain dispute complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which ordered the disputed domain name to be transferred to the team shortly after the USPTO issued a Notice of Allowance to the NFL team for a trademark on TitletownTech, leaving the Wisconsin family with zilch. And so the old titletowntech.com ("TitleTown Tech Solutions") was just a bad memory by the time Microsoft returned to Green Bay last week to give an update on the joint venture, including the news that Microsoft will play a key role in the leadership team at TitletownTech, which will also house its TEALS program employees. [...] And as for the domain name, the NFL franchise with more titles than any other team ultimately did what it has done for years -- win.
They received 0 compensation? Really? Did they get their domain registration fees back at least?
I have some experience with this.
I was the original registrant of live.net. Original registration cost: $0. It was registered by email. (I later had to start paying $35/year to maintain the registration.) Sadly, live.com had been taken a few months prior, but live.net would do, and I wrote a convincing argument for the use of the .net. (At the time, .net domains had to justify some use related to "network infrastructure".)
At the time, I was operating the San Diego Baycam as a hobby. It was hosted at a local ISP gratis and was just using a subdomain of the ISP. It ran on a spare Spark 5 that they had.
At some point, I was contacted by a nice guy named Howard. Howard had backed some early satellite broadcasting venture that didn't make it. Howard had lots of ideas, which tended to be a just bit too early for the times or technology. He now had an idea to create a network of outdoor cams world wide. We talked, we met, we shook hands.
I registered live.net under a gentleman's agreement on behalf of a business to-be-formed with Howard, and moved the Baycam to live.net. The gentleman's agreement was vague. We would do some exploration, and set up a company at some time in the future with some kind of equity split. In the mean time, I would continue to develop the feeder and server software I'd written for the Baycam. (I thought it pretty clever at the time - the server used a circular shared memory buffer, so that multiple viewers were just pulling frames from the buffer. The "video" was motion JPEG using now-obsolete "server push". But no thoughts of how it might scale beyond one server, LOL.)
I registered the domain myself, since the business hadn't been formed. Of course, this is where a LOT of domain registrations go bad! Become a ticking time-bomb, actually. My advice to anyone who needs to register a domain has always been: 1. Don't let anybody register a domain for you - do it yourself. 2. Registrar, DNS, and hosting have to be with separate companies.
The business-to-be never happened. Howard went on to do other things (vegas.com). The Baycam hummed along.
One day, I got an offer out of the blue to buy the domain live.net for $28,000. No idea where they got that figure from - you'd think a buyer would start lower than that... The buyer had a bunch of ski-related travel sites, all registered under disparate domain names. He said he wanted to integrate his ski cams and ski sites under a single domain. It seemed odd to me, because the name live.net had nothing to do with skiing, but whatever....
So, I contacted Howard and asked if he was interested in selling the domain, and splitting the profit. (I'm a nice guy, he's a nice guy...)
We did, escrowing it through escrow.com flawlessly. escrow.com disbursed equal checks to myself and Howard. So, so far, I'm a nice guy, Howard's a nice guy, escrow.com are nice guys.
The buyer put up his ski sites and ski cams, and as part of our agreement, I continued to operate the San Diego Baycam on a subdomain.
Fast forward a year, and I was checking the site. My browser was redirected to Microsoft. I sent off a panicked email to the buyer that his domain had somehow been "hijacked", and the hijacker was forwarding to Microsoft! The domain registration had been changed, and it had private registration.
The buyer emailed me back, no there was no hijacking! He's sold the domain to Microsoft. For how much, I know not.
Shortly thereafter, Microsoft announced their Live rebranding...
Had the buyer known a year in advance of the Live rebranding? I've often wondered. It was a year, and they actually had a network of ski sites and ski cams. It wasn't the best name for a network of ski sites and ski cams. I imagine he did not know. live.com was the primary domain for the rebranding, live.net was presumably "protective" to catch mis-types of TLD. The big question mark has always been the generosity of the unsolicited offer. (This was long enough ago that $28,000 was a lot for