Group sends our RFP for whois abuse study.

ICANN, through Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), is seeking proposals from qualified companies to study whois abuse. One of its proposed mechanisms for studying abuse is to set up a number of test domain names to see what happens to the whois data created for them.

A similar study (pdf) was conducted in 2007, but only to research whois harvesting for spam. In the new study, GNSO will also check for postal/phone solicitations, phishing, and identity theft.

A number of scams are perpetrated using e-mail addresses harvested from whois. Two popular ones are the renewal scam — which seeks to get you to transfer your domain to another registrar — and the domain appraisal scam. Whois data is also used for marketing. Even large companies have used whois data for marketing in the past; I once received a mailing from Yahoo addressed using whois contact information.

I have long proposed having a registry, or even ICANN-level domain masking service. This would mask all registration email addresses as domain.tld@verisign.com or similar, and would forward all mail to the domain owner. This would allow the registry or ICANN to shut down scams. (Although this probably isn’t a responsibility they’d like). Doing this would require a thick-whois model.

More information on ICANN’s RFP is here.

The Ad.com saga gets more interesting.

Sedo has completed the sale of AdMedia.com for $50,000. This is a curious sale because of what is now up at AdMedia.com:

Zoom in on a couple key elements, including the logo and copyright notice:

It sure looks like whomever has created this basic web site at AdMedia.com is trying to make a play on Ad.com, the disputed trademark that has caused some million dollar heartache.

There’s very little information about AdMedia.com on the web site; only a few contact forms. Its whois is privacy protected. It will be interesting to watch this one.

In other Sedo sales this past week, the auction for Rent.co.uk has closed and the deal completed. The final sale price was the opening bid of 65,000 GBP, or just a hair over $100,000 USD at today’s exchange rates.

Other Sedo sales from the past week:

.COM
capeverde.com 31,000 USD
zoost.com 25,500 USD
qmed.com 20,000 USD
arcos.com 11,000 USD
shareprices.com 10,000 GBP
brandkarma.com 10,000 USD
cash4coins.com 9,500 USD
livings.com 8,000 USD
workingmemory.com 7,700 USD
simplyfaster.com 7,000 USD
yescar.com 7,000 USD
savvia.com 5,500 USD
countrystory.com 5,000 USD
finestone.com 5,000 USD
debauch.com 5,000 USD
fonebook.com 5,000 USD

ccTLD
hacker.de 22,000 EUR
e-business.de 11,100 EUR
ro.ly 9,999 USD
movi.es 7,325 EUR
weddingforum.co.uk 6,600 GBP
parts.us 6,500 USD
boot.ch 5,500 EUR
favoriet.nl 5,000 EUR

Other
science.org 20,000 USD
iot.net 6,500 USD
tradematch.net 5,850 EUR
figa.org 5,500 USD
aromatherapy.net 5,000 USD

Live Current Media reports financial results.

Live Current Media (livce.ob) reported that it lost $1,404,000 in the quarter ended June 30 on revenue of $1,705,000. That compares to a loss of $916,000 in the first quarter of the calendar year, but the loss is much less than in the last two quarters of 2008 thanks to cost cutting.

The company has sold seven domain names this year through August for $3.4 million, not including the Cricket.com domain name. These sales do not count as revenue and are not part of the income statement, so the cash flow situation is better than the income statement.

On June 30, 2009, Live Current determined that its purchase of auction software company Auctomatic was impaired and wrote off $590,973 of the purchase price. Live Current acquired the company in 2008 for $5 million in cash and stock.

The details of Live Current’s results are here.

Comedians file for arbitration to get domain name.

Comedy duo Richard “Cheech” Marin and Tommy Chong are reuniting — to go after the domain name CheechandChong.com. After a long separation, the pair have been making numerous appearances and a tour together. So it naturally follows that they’d want to grab the domain name. A complaint was filed World Intellectual Property Organization and should be resolved within a couple months.

The domain name is currently used by Traced Inc. as a web site selling all kinds of “paraphernalia” related to the comedians. That includes everything from DVDs to t-shirts to lighters. At the bottom of the web site is a disclaimer:

Disclaimer: Cheech and Chong Dot Com is a Cheech and Chong fan site. It is not operated by Cheech and Chong.

Perhaps it’s a fan site, but it’s basically an online store for Cheech & Chong memorabilia.

You can’t blame Cheech & Chong for not getting their hands on this domain a while ago. They couldn’t have registered it back in the seventies. And things have been a bit fuzzy since then.

Inconsistency in UDRP decisions.

Officially, UDRP stands for Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. But sometimes it seems it should be called various-form, or not-uniform. How arbitrators decide cases can be a crap shoot.

Here’s a recent example: ChinaDiesel.com. The complainant lost the case. But what’s interesting is how the arbitrator approached the first requirement of UDRP:

“the domain name registered by Respondent is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which Complainant has rights”

Most arbitration panels will find in favor of the complainant for this aspect if they have a trademark in the term, regardless of whether it was obtained before or after the domain registration. In the case it was obtained after the domain was registered, that is handled under the third element of the policy: that the domain was registered and used in bad faith. After all, it’s hard to prove someone registered a domain with the trademark in mind if he registered it prior to the trademark being created (unless, as some panels have decided, the respondent is psychic).

But in ChinaDiesel.com, the arbitrator said the complainant’s trademark for China Diesel was obtained after the domain was registered, so the complainant failed to prove the first aspect of the policy.

Another frequent inconsistency is whether or not domain parking is a bona fide use of a domain. Panels go either way on this, and it seems to depend on whether or not the rest of the case is going for or against the respondent. If everything is pointing in the respondent’s favor, the panel will usually say that a parked domain is a legitimate use of a domain. If it’s going against the respondent, the panel will rule that a parked domain is not a legitimate use.

Michael Berkens noted another inconsistency the other day, where a panel found that offering to sell a domain wasn’t proof of bad faith. Of course, offering a domain for sale doesn’t have to be proof of bad faith registration, but you’ll see this go both ways, too.