GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar, has filed almost 50 patent applications in recent years.

Yesterday I wrote about GoDaddy receiving a patent that covers many aspects of domain whois privacy. After digging a little further I discovered that the company must have recently hired a patent attorney — GoDaddy has almost 50 patent applications pending.

Like any company on a patent binge, some of the applications have merit and some don’t.

One interesting application will allow a registrar to communicate with a registrant electronically but without the use of e-mail. Application 20060031330 would allow GoDaddy to ping customer’s computers with alerts. This addresses the problem with registrants not receiving renewal notices due to spam filters and e-mail address changes. Software to do this already exists, but GoDaddy is applying it to the domain industry. I came up with another solution while writing this paragraph and it only costs $.39. It’s called snail mail.

Application 20050289084 would allow domain registrants with domain privacy to receive a secure socket layer certificate. I don’t know about you, but if a company won’t make its whois information public I certainly don’t want to buy anything from their e-commerce store.

Application 20050216288 streamlines the process of registering a domain name and trademarking the domain. GoDaddy offers a product like this.

Application 20050021588 seeks to patent a “turnkey” registrar reseller program. I admit that GoDaddy has a good reseller system, but this patent application might be a stretch. The application abstract reads:

“A reseller program may be used to increase the number of Customer desired domain names that are registered by a Registrar. There are two main embodiments of this reseller program. In the first embodiment, Resellers guide Customers to a Registrar web site through the use of advertisements, links in various web sites and/or links from search engines. The Registrar web site communicates directly with the Customer and registers the Customer desired domain names and compensates the Reseller for guiding the Customer to the Registrar web site. In the second embodiment, Resellers have their own reseller web sites that communicate directly with the Customers and communicate the desired domain names to the Registrar web site so the Registrar web site can register the Customer desired domain names. In this embodiment, the Customer may compensate the Reseller and the Reseller may compensate the Registrar for the services rendered.”

If I’m reading application 20040199620 correctly, GoDaddy wants to patent the domain transfer process. The first claim of that application reads:

“A system for transferring sponsorship of a domain name previously registered to a registrant from a First Registrar to a Second Registrar, comprising: A) a web site operated by a Second Registrar having fields for receiving a domain name, domain name transfer request and Customer information from a Customer; B) an internal database for storing the domain name, the Customer information and an associated status flag indicating the Customer wants to transfer sponsorship of the domain name from a First Registrar to the Second Registrar; C) a Verify WHOIS Service for verifying the Customer is the registrant of the domain name; D) an Agent Service for sending a transfer request to an authoritative Registry; and E) a Transfer Service for receiving a response from the Registry and updating the associated status flag for the domain name in the internal database to reflect the response from the Registry. ”

Application 20040199520 might cause concern as well. It’s titled “Method for checking the availability of a domain name.” GoDaddy is trying to patent certain aspects of domain registration to make it easier.

Although some of these applications may seem rediculous, GoDaddy has certainly been an innovative registrar that pushes the envelope. It’s reasonable for the company to be rewarded for its efforts…so long as it doesn’t cross the line.

Title insurance would provide peace of mind when making a large domain purchase.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I read an article in Forbes (November 13, page 148) about real estate title insurance. The article was about how real estate title insurance is a joke and overpriced. But as I read in the article how titles are investigated, in dawned on me that a title check service for domain names would be helpful.

Title checks and title insurance would prevent you from losing money when you bought a stolen domain. Last year I almost got bilked for $5,000 buying domains…before I discovered they were stolen. I basically ran my own title check to find out the domains were stolen.

Here’s how domain name title insurance might work:

You pay a company to research the history and ownership of a domain to make sure it doesn’t have any past legal issues such as UDRP proceedings, suspicious transfers, etc. This would require using a historical whois database and perhaps making a few phone calls to previous owners of the domain to make sure it traded hands properly. The service might also run a trademark search to make sure there aren’t trademark issues. For an additional fee, the domain name title company would insure you against any losses should it turn out that the domain didn’t have a clear title or should you lose the domain in a trademark dispute.

A company like Name Intelligence might be a good provider of this service given its historical database of domain name information.

Purchasers of expensive domains frequently hire law firms to run trademark checks and do their own investigations. But this is a service that could be productized to the benefit of the domain name community. Stolen domains and trademark domains are a cloud over the industry and title insurance could help evaporate it.

Apparently I’m not the only person to envision a need for domain name title insurance. I checked a few domain names, including the ones below, and they were already registered.

DomainTitleInsurance.com
DomainInsurance.com
DNTitleInsurance.com
DNInsurance.com
DomainNameTitleInsurance.com
DomainNameInsurance.com

Demand Media, founded by former MySpace executive Richard Rosenblatt earlier this year, hopes to go public in 2007.

When Business 2.0 published an article in December 2005 called “Masters of Their Domains”, many in the domain industry sighed. They knew that a bunch of people would read the article and believe they could still get rich with domain names. An employee of a domain parking company told me that after the article appeared they got calls from people who had just registered a domain and hoped to earn thousands in parking revenue.

One of those “newbies” who read the article was MySpace.com ex Richard Rosenblatt. Since reading the article he has raised $220M in capital for his domain company, Demand Media. The company bought registrars eNom and BulkRegister and is snapping up domains left and right. His goal is to turn these domains into destinations with user-generated content (a la MySpace).

Raising $220M in less than a year is quite an accomplishment. But Rosenblatt isn’t stopping there. According to a Business 2.0 article called “Giving the Audience Its Own Domain” (December 2006), he plans to take the company public near the end of 2007 and achieve a $2B market cap the following year.

Before he can do that, Rosenblatt must prove that users will contribute content to his niche domains — and that he can scale the process. Running thousands of user communities across various industries is easier said than done. Furthermore, it’s unclear how the registrar acquisitions will further this plan.

But one thing is for sure. Money is flowing into the domain name market, benefiting almost everyone in the industry.

GoDaddy has been been awarded United States patent 7,130,878, which covers many aspects of domain whois privacy services.

In what could prove to be a major competitive coup for GoDaddy, the company was awarded a patent for so-called domain privacy services on October 31, 2006. The patent, filed for in July 2003, lists GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons along with Joshua Coffman and Barbara Rechterman as inventors. The title of the patent is “Systems and methods for domain name registration by proxy.”

GoDaddy has made a mint over the past few years selling domain privacy services, in which registrants are allowed to hide their data from the Whois database. Although originally created to protect people from stalkers and spam, the services are now used frequently by people who own trademark and typo domain names and want to make it difficult for lawyers to track them down.

GoDaddy’s regular price for adding domain privacy to a registration is $8.99, although the company frequently offers promotions. Many other registrars offer domain privacy services. Some charge a fee although competition is causing many of them to offer domain privacy for free.

If GoDaddy’s patent withstands scrutiny, the company will be able to extract licensing fees from other registrars that offer similar services. Or GoDaddy could play hard ball and make these registrars use GoDaddy’s service (or nothing at all). Either way, this may prove to strengthen GoDaddy’s grip on the domain name industry.

Given the importance of domain privacy services, don’t be surprised if other domain registrars team up to fight the claims of this patent.

You can review the patent on the USPTO web site.

The patent abstract is as follows:

A system and method of proxy domain name registration permits a would-be domain name registrant anonymity. A registrar affords customers the opportunity to use the proxy registration. If the customer seeking registration of a domain name requests, the registrar obtains contact information needed for registration from a proxy entity established for this purpose. The registrar completes the registration of the domain name with the appropriate registry (i.e. “.com, .net” etc.). The contact information published in WHOIS is that of proxy entity. Contractually the customer is afforded control over the domain name. Emails intended for the customer are received by the proxy entity who may filter them if the customer requests. Emails sent by the customer are sent to the proxy entity who in turn sends them to the indicated addressee.

Traffic to consumer-related domain names will begin its seasonal spike this weekend.

Thursday is the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. Holidays usually mean a reduction in internet traffic to parked domains and web sites. But this coming weekend marks the start of the fast and furious holiday shopping season, in which domain owners report a spike of traffic to their consumer-related domain names.

Owners of consumer domain names, such as those related to computers, electronics, and toys, should expect domain parking revenue to rise sharply beginning this weekend. Monday is the so-called “Cyber Monday”, which e-commerce providers bill as the internet’s version of Black Friday, a big shopping day for bricks-and-mortar stores. Cyber Monday isn’t actually the biggest online shopping day of the year — that usually occurs the first or second week of December — but it is certainly the start of the traffic flood.

Christmas isn’t the end of the consumer domain holiday season. Traffic to domains swells after the holidays as shoppers research their new gadgets, figure out how to spend their gift cards, and look for accessories for their electronics.