GoDaddy Files Patent for “Domain Name Hijack Protection”
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
Patent covers system to automatically reject domain name transfers.
GoDaddy has filed a patent for a system to protect against domain name theft. The patent lists GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons as the sole inventor and was filed last year, but was not published until this month.
United States Patent Application 20080215716 describes a service subscribed to by customers in which domain transfer-out notices are automatically ignored. A notice is sent to the customer informing them that a transfer-out request was received and ignored. The service can be applied to private registrations.
The patent application seems to cover aspects of GoDaddy’s “Deadbolt Transfer Protection” service. As part of a larger security offering including expiration protection and whois privacy, the service costs $24.99 per year.
According to the patent application, users can turn the protection on or off from within their account. I don’t see how this is much of an improvement over standard domain locking since both can be turned on or off from within the account. [Update: although it can be turned off from within the account, apparently you have to send in a copy of your ID according to a commenter. See comments.]
Domain theft is a real problem, and registrars are stepping up efforts to protect domain names. Moniker just released MaxLock, a service that requires offline authentication before a domain name is transferred or pushed to another account.
Tags: bob parsons, GoDaddy, maxlock, Moniker
The transfer protection actually cannot be turned off from within the account like locking. It has to either be allowed to expire or photo id sent to Go Daddy confirming it is the registrant requesting the protection removal. Trust me, it’s a pain to get rid of.
Doug, thanks for the clarification. That makes more sense.
‘GoDaddy Files Patent for “Domain Name Hijack Protection””
Now if only GoDaddy could come up with a patent
for “Reverse Domain Name Hijack Protection” they’d be onto something.
Patrick
Patrick - that would be something…I’ll get working on it
[...] introduced additional security questions in addition to their “Executive Lock” and GoDaddy filed a patent for a system that automatically rejects domain transfers and launched their Deadbolt Transfer Protection for an annual fee of [...]
[...] introduced additional security questions in addition to their “Executive Lock” and GoDaddy filed a patent for a system that automatically rejects domain transfers and launched their Deadbolt Transfer Protection for an annual fee of [...]