Domain name owner sues media company after receiving cease & desist letter.

Semoran LLC, which owns the web site and domain name FloridaWeekly.com, has filed a lawsuit against a Florida media company in response to that company’s request for the FloridaWeekly.com domain name.

Semoran received a cease & desist letter from MacFarlane Ferguson & McMullen, which represents Florida Media Group, LLC. It appears that Florida Media Group recently launched a newspaper that uses the domain name Florida-Weekly.com. That is, of course, a horrible domain name for any purpose. Many people will not type the hyphen and end up at FloridaWeekly.com.

FloridaWeekly.com was registered in 2003, long before Florida Media Group’s launch of Florida-Weekly.com earlier this year. But that didn’t stop Florida Media Group from asserting that Semoran was infrining on its trademark. The cease & desist letter demanded that Semoran hand over the domain name for no more thena $1,000.

Technically, this doesn’t qualify as a reverse hijacking case unless Floria Media Group files a UDRP. But it’s basically the same thing. A company realizes it doesn’t own what it wants, so it tries to bully a small guy without deep pockets. But in this case Semoran scrapped together enough money to hire a lawyer. Semoran filed a lawsuit against Florida Media Group to get it to drop its pursuit. Semoran is not asking for any money.

On the FloridaWeekly.com web site, Semoran says, “We felt like someone moved into our neighborhood and then they told us that they wanted our house for a fraction of its true value or they would knock it down.”

The Internet Commerce Association led Semoran in the right direction in this case.

Registrar continues patent filing campaign.

GoDaddy isn’t just the world’s biggest registrar. It might be the biggest filer of patents in the industry as well.

Last November I wrote about the almost 50 patents pending for GoDaddy. The company didn’t stopped there.

One of the more recent filings was January 24 of this year and was just published in May. The patent is a continuation-in-part of GoDaddy’s U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/811,677 filed on Mar. 29, 2004 titled “METHOD FOR A FACILITATOR TO ASSIST AN ENTREPRENEUR IN CREATING AN INTERNET BUSINESS”.

This continuation (application 20070112950) covers the concept of protecting a domain name owner from having his or her domain name expire. As explained in the application:

…the Facilitator [registrar] may also offer domain name expiration protection…If the Entrepreneur did not renew the domain name and it expires, the Facilitator may renew the domain name. No funds are withdrawn from the Entrepreneur financial accounts at the point of domain name renewal. The domain name may be renewed in the name of the or in the name of another party, e.g. in the name of the Facilitator. If the domain name is renewed in the name of the Entrepreneur, the registrant’s name and the contact information that were used to register the domain name may be used for the domain name renewal…

The Entrepreneur may further reimburse the Facilitator for the renewal fees, private registration fees, or any other fees and/or expenses that may be encountered from the Facilitator’s renewal of the domain name. The Facilitator may hold the domain name as collateral until the Entrepreneur pays any outstanding fees. The Facilitator may hold the domain name by locking it or registering it in its own name. After the fees due are paid, the Facilitator may release control of the domain name to the Entrepreneur by unlocking it or transferring it to the Entrepreneur.

Depending on how it is filed, a continuation patent can grant patent status based on the date the original patent was filed. Companies often file continuation patents because they have not defined how a service or function will work when they file the initial patent, but have since defined how it works.

GoDaddy has also filed some interested patents that may play in Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) court. One patent would allow for search results to be filtered according to the reputation score of a domain name or that domain name owner’s reputation. Google already uses domain expiration data in its search algorithm.

Here’s a wild thought. Would Google ever acquire GoDaddy? Google would get its hands on reams of data about the very domain names it is indexing, as well acquire its patent portfolio. (Google already has a deal with GoDaddy to provide domain names.)

Summer doldrums are ending; are your domains ready for Fall traffic?

Ah, summer. The weather is warm, the beaches packed, the kids out of school, and families on vacation. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Not if you count on internet traffic for a living. August is historically a poor month for domain name parking. But school is back in session at the end of this month and traffic will increase again. Take this downtime to make sure your domains are optimize and ready for more traffic.

Here are updates for popular parking services:

Parked continues to perform well. I’m running just shy of a $100 RPM for this month. The company just released a new feature for uploading custom graphics, which I explained last week.

DomainSponsor recently announced that it will have a “one click” lander by the end of the year, in which ads are positioned on the initial landing page. The company is also supplementing its primary ad feeds with advertisements from its own network, which provides it important independence from big ad companies like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO). My highest traffic domain at DomainSponsor has a $408 RPM, which skews my overall number. But suffice it to say that DomainSponsor remains one of the most popular parking companies for a reason.

TrafficClub is still only showing ads from Skenzo, but plans are in the works for more ad feeds. Skenzo isn’t delivering very relevant pictures on many of my domains, which is likely hurting overall click-through rates.

NameDrive’s Park & Sell program is in full swing. The company hosted “Park & Sell” Poker at Domain Roundtable. The poker chips had domains and earnings listed on them. The winner of each game won three domains by selecting chips.

Sedo’s SedoPro domains continue to be picked up in search engines. I’m not seeing many clicks on those domains in search engines, but it’s traffic I wouldn’t otherwise get. The design of the landing pages, including a paragraph of text about the subject, certainly helps from a search engine standpoint.

Dotzup, the G-rated parking platform, continues to perform well with quality landing pages. I’m earning about $50 RPM there, although my portfolio at Dotzup is limited.

TrafficZ hosted a wild party at Domain Roundtable in Seattle, and proceeds went directly to Grassroots.org. TrafficZ and DomainTools are giving away a 90% revenue share for Q4 of this year at TrafficZ parking and a one year free Gold Membership to DomainTools for an entire company to anyone that donates $5,000 to GrassRoots.

Reports about imminent approval of North Korea country code domain name are misleading, says ICANN.

A new country code domain for North Korea? Not really.

Last week, media reports starting surfacing that ICANN would approve .KP as the country code domain for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) at the upcoming upcoming ICANN meeting in Los Angeles, California. In reality, .KP has always been assigned as the country code for North Korea. The operation of country code domains are in the jurisdiction of the country to which it is assigned, and ICANN has little role in that process. As ICANN explains on its web site:

The operation of a country’s ccTLD is an internal matter for each country and its local Internet community. In support of this, ICANN is responsible for delegating authority for the operation of ccTLDs to a specific operator based upon requests received from the country and its local Internet community. ICANN’s evaluation is focused on verifying the validity of the request, and ensuring it meets a number of technically-focused criteria. Apart from this analysis, the selection of both the operator, and the method of operation of a ccTLD is a matter for countries and local Internet communities to decide.

Perhaps the confusion is because ICANN recently received a request to delegate the domain:

At the present time there is no delegated operator for the .KP domain, but ICANN has received a request to delegate the domain. This request was discussed by the ICANN Board at its meeting on 14 August 2007…No decision was made on the delegation during this meeting.

At this time the issues slated for discussion at the board meeting in Los Angeles have yet to be determined.

Some of the media stories quotes Suh Jae-Chul as being a member of the ICANN board, which is false:

As well, media reports have quoted Suh Jae-Chul as a member of the ICANN board, though this person is not on ICANN’s board, nor has been authorized to speak on ICANN’s behalf.

Domain name parking company hits payment glitches with outsourced provider.

Just a few months after outsourcing its publishers’ payments through Paychex, domain parking company DomainSponsor has brought its payments back in house.

DomainSponsor had some glitches with the transition to Paychex. Some publishers received their past two payments made out to their contact person rather than the company name. This was only a problem if the contact was an employee of a larger company; otherwise it just required two check endorsements for banks to cash the payments correctly. The other problem is if the 1099 record keeping is off, which would mean the contact’s information is sent to the IRS at the end of the year. DomainSponsor should be able to adjust accordingly for tax purposes and this shouldn’t be a problem.

ACH payments will also be affected. Customers who moved to ACH will now receive payments as bank wires.

DomainSponsor announced the change on its web site:

Moving away from Paychex

As you already know, we migrated to the Paychex system a few months back to handle publisher payouts. We experienced some issues, as a result of which we have decided to bring the payment process back in house.

In interim, we will switch publishers that were transitioned to Direct Deposit (ACH) method back to ‘Wire’; and the minimum payment threshold will continue to be maintained at $1000.

We would like to continue to offer the benefits of Direct Deposit to our US Publishers (like lower minimum payment thresholds and lower/no transaction fees); and are actively looking for the correct solution of offering ACH.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused.

Thanks, DSSupport