Deadline for next TRAFFIC live domain auction is Friday.

Domain owners wishing to submit domain names for Moniker’s upcoming live domain name auction at TRAFFIC in April have until this Friday to submit domain names. The online submission form is available on Moniker’s web site. Submitting domain names is much easier than in the past when you had to email a spreadsheet. Moniker has a simple online form for submitting domains now.

Domains accepted for Moniker’s auctions have an exclusivity period and carry a 15% sales commission. Be sure to read the terms of service to understand the agreement you’re entering in to when submitting domains. It’s fair, but some people are caught off guard by the exclusivity period.

Moniker just added a new feature to its web site that lets you view all live and silent auction sales from previous auctions. The auction results archive lets you search based on year, keyword, price, event, top level domain, and auction type (live/silent) to get an idea what domains have sold for. The archive is also good for reminiscing about the good ‘ole days in 2007.

Navigation Catalyst back in court.

Navigation Catalyst Systems, Inc. finds itself in a familiar place: in court defending itself against cybersquatting claims. This time the plaintiff is The Weather Underground, Inc.

Navigation Catalyst distributed a browser plugin for its New.net product that allowed it to capture typo information, which helped spur the company into alleged massive typosquatting registrations earlier this decade. The lawsuit does not mention this browser plugin, but alleges New.net targeted high traffic web sites, discovered typos, and tasted domains for traffic. It kept the high traffic domains.

The company has had to defend itself against charges of cybersquatting from such heavyweights as Verizon, Wachovia, and Wynn Resorts.

The Weather Underground successfully won 41 domain names from Navigation Catalyst in a UDRP at National Arbitration Forum last year. Apparently fed up with Navigation Catalyst’s policy of only handing over domains when requested or forced by an arbitration panel, Weather Underground sued on numerous accounts including violation of the Anti-cybersquatting act.

Any efforts Defendants make to avoid typo-squatting is disingenuous and halfhearted
at best, done only to distract from their unlawful business model which targets high
traffic, and thus often trademark protected, domain names and typographical errors made by
consumers attempting to access the legitimate domain names corresponding to the respective
underlying entity.

The case, filed February 27, is pending in United States District Court, Eastern District of Michigan.

Owner of VirtualSex.com defends domain name in arbitration.

An arbitrator with World Intellectual Property Organization has ruled that the owners of VirtualSex.com can keep their domain name.

A challenge was mounted by Digital Playground, Inc, an adult movie producer. Digital Playground has a hard-fought trademark on the term “Virtual Sex”, and claimed first use in commerce back in 1994. The respondent registered the domain name in 1995 and said it had not heard of Digital Playground’s trademark at the time, concluding it was a generic term.

Digital Playground failed to prove that the domain name was registered and used in bad faith. Among other things, it didn’t help that the company took 14 years before filing for arbitration. Here’s what the panel wrote about the not-so secondary meaning of the term Virtual Sex and the delay:

However, Complainant produces no evidence of the acquisition of secondary meaning by August 1995. Moreover, the fact that Complainant did not bring this action until 14 years after Respondent had registered the domain name at issue and more than 13 years after Respondent had used the domain name at issue to resolve to a web site at which products competitive to those offered by Complainant, as well as products entirely different from those offered by Complainant, is not explained by Complainant.

Finally the diverse offerings available on the web site to which the domain name at issue resolves suggest that Respondent is trading on the descriptiveness of the term “virtual sex,” rather than on the goodwill attached to Complainant’s mark.

As any good journalist would do, I conducted full and complete research of VirtualSex.com’s content prior to writing this story. Results from Archive.org and DomainTools show the domain resolving to variety of landing pages until late 2004. Since then it has resolved on a parked page.

Detroit-based insurance agency shells out 6 figures for domain name.

L.A. Insurance has purchased the domain name LAInsurance.com from NameMedia for $100,000. Although the number may seem high for a geo insurance domain name, this deal makes perfect sense for the buyer. (As it turns out, “L.A.” is not a geography to this company).

L.A. insurance has 150 locations and currently uses the domain name LAInsuranceAgency.com. It’s no doubt that a number of its customers type in LAInsurance.com when trying to find it. With 150 locations, the purchase price comes out to just $133 per store for the next five years. That’s not bad for the added traffic and business this domain will deliver. The company is actually based in Detroit, not Los Angeles (although it does have stores in California). It also runs a chain of cash advance stores.

The name servers for the domain have not yet changed to point to the company, but the whois record shows L.A. Insurance’s founder as the owner.

Here are other notable sales by NameMedia, parent company of BuyDomains and Afternic, this past week.

bandh.com $20,000
competicion.com $10,000
investorchallenge.com $6,300
DropshipCLUB.com $6,250
musicacademy.com $6,000
shopbest.com $5,400
meworld.com $5,188
onlineaccountingdegree.com $5,130
classroomconnection.com $5,000
etico.com $4,788
cios.com $4,500
pedireito.com $4,400
bachelorofscience.com $4,388
balancethebudget.com $4,288
globalenvironmental.com $4,050
uswills.com $4,000
traveldesign.com $4,000

Popular internet site’s founder to auction off Cloud.com.

SYS-CON Events, promotor of this month’s Cloud Computing Expo in New York, has announced that the domain name Cloud.com will be auctioned off during the conference.

Cloud.com is owned by Meetup.com co-founder Scott Heiferman. I attempted to contact Heiferman but the phone number in whois is not a working number. The e-mail address for the contact is on the Heiferman.com domain name.

In a 2007 post on his personal web site, Heiferman wrote:

“I happen to believe in a Web OS [& I own cloud.com]. Funny how the social OS is now web OS.”

Cloud.com was registered in 2000. This domain name is another example of a domain that grew in value after the initial dot.com gold rush. Much like “blog”, “cloud” had limited use and value before the advent and popularization of cloud computing.

The domain name is currently a parked page. Compete.com estimates just over 1,000 monthly unique visitors.

No word on a reserve or starting price for the auction, but this domain is easily worth six figures. Or perhaps seven?