What internet laws are there to protect domain name ownership?
Monte: Right, okay. Well, let’s move on to domains held hostage. Explain the issues regarding these problems with--
Ari: Right.
Monte: --the--
Ari: This is actually an issue that’s less won for, you know, the domain owner or the term I affectionately use, “domain hurter crowd [ph]”. This is more of an issue for small businesses. I’m getting more and more calls these days from people who tell me, “Hey, you know, I have this domain name that--I had an employee that knew about the internet and I asked him to register the domain name for me, and he registered it in his name and he was the administrative contact.”
Monte: And it happens all the time.
Ari: All the time. “We’ve had a falling apart and now he controls the domain name.” And the domain owner doesn’t have a trademark for the domain name, so they can’t really use the UDRP to get that domain name back, it’s a very sticky issue, I’ve got a bunch of cases dealing with it right now. And, you know, simple bit of advice I have is, you know, be your own administrative contract, don’t let anybody else do it. It’s amazing to me how many even large companies are not the administrative contact for the domain name.
Monte: Right.
Ari: They let their web designer; they let their web host be the admin contact. So, you know, check your domain names, make sure you’re the admin contact. Monte, you know this better than I, make sure that the e-mail address, the domain name associated with your admin contact is up-to-date and paid up, otherwise you’re gonna find that you could lose control of that domain name. It’s an interesting issue, and that’s an issue where I think there needs to be some law. All the laws dealing with domain names deal in trademark. If you have a trademark, you could do anything, you could file a UDRP action, you can file a federal court action, “Hey I have a trademark for that domain name, I want that domain name,” the court says, “Fine, you got it,” unless there’s some good defenses. But what about the guy who registered a domain name, paid it up over five years, good, he’s been using it as a business, doesn’t have a trademark, and then all of a sudden, he wakes up in the morning and finds out that domain name’s registered to someone else, because they hacked in and stole the name.
Monte: Right.
Ari: What do you do? There’s nothing, there’s no specific law that protects that ownership of that domain name. I mean, you could use other laws, like theft and trespassing conversion, but there’s not a specific law that says, “You’re the owner of this domain name and we have some protection for you.” The registrar, really has no liability because they’re protected because, you know, what can the registrar do, the registrar essentially, you know, uses the administrative contact address as the authorization for transfer of the domain name. If the admin contact approves it, fine. It’s done; the name gets transferred.
Monte: Right.
Ari: So, there’s nothing protecting that former owner, and, you know, perhaps they’ll be some laws that will do that down the road, and there’s really lobbying organization for the domain owner, that’s the problem. There is one for trademark owners.
Monte: Right. Well, as you know, at Moniker, we have mechanisms in place, not to give ourselves another plug, but we prevent that occurrence from even happening from a registrar standpoint so that that--
Ari: Right, sure.
Monte: --former owner can’t even pull that name out.
Ari: That’s good.
Monte: So it’s real important to--because it’s a problem on the backend, trying to get the domain name once it’s happened, try to prevent it before that happens by hacking.
Ari: Yeah, I mean, you know, as you know, there’s registrars out there that are very receptive to this issue, and there’s others that turn a blind eye.
Monte: Exactly.
Ari: Which is surprising, because, you know, it’s not in the long-term interest of the registrar, you know, you should protect your domain owners.
Monte: Exactly.
Ari: And it’s good that you guys do that. There are a number of them out there that are great, you know, that will look into the fact and say, “Obviously this domain name was stolen,” but there are a lot of others that won’t, and that’s unfortunate, and there’ve been some real egregious cases of domain theft in the past few years, and there’s really nothing out there to protect that, the owner.
Monte: Right, right, definitely. How about title to domains? How do you make sure that the person that you’re buying a domain name from is truly the owner and that they received the domain name in proper legal format?
Ari: Right. There’s not a--you know, unlike when you buy real estate, you do a title search and you can get title insurance and you can find out who was the owner of that house. You can’t--you know, you’re not gonna buy a house from someone who just happened to be parked in front of it who says here’s my house, I’ll sell it to you for, you know, $100,000, and you pay them and you find out they weren’t the owner. But that can happen with domain names. And it happens all the time, someone hacks in and steals the domain name and does a quick sale, there probably have been dozens of these situations happening over the past couple years. How do you know that the person that you’re buying the domain name is actually the owner, isn’t an employee of the owner, for example, isn’t someone who stole the domain name?
Monte: Which has happened, you know, like you said it’s happening all over the place.
Ari: It happens all the time.
Monte: God, it’s terrible.
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