A Belated 2008 Domain Dunce: John Berryhill
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Better late than never, here’s a 2008 Domain Dunce Award.
This week I’ve run a series of posts with Domain Dunce Awards for 2009. But there was one I missed last year that is worth giving a retroactive award for.
This one goes out to John Berryhill, the well known domain name attorney. What could a domain name lawyer due to earn this not-so-prestigious award? It’s more what he didn’t do: renew his domain name Berryhill.net. When it expired last year, one of his own clients picked it up in the drop.
How could a domain attorney make such a critical domain name mistake? For all his prowess at responding to UDRPs, he appears to have difficulty with dates. Scheduled to speak at Traffic Down Under 2008 on a Tuesday, Berryhill showed up on Wednesday, having forgotten that Australia is on the other side of the International Date Line. Word is he’s still sending invoices from 2007 and will be wearing a “Happy New Year 2005″ hat tomorrow evening.
So, for his failure to renew his domain name, we give him a 2008 Domain Dunce Award. He probably won’t notice the date, anyway.
(By the way, you can still find John on the web at JohnBerryhill.com. That domain doesn’t expire until October 2010, and hopefully is set up for auto renewal.)
Further Reading:
- 2008 Domain Dunce Awards: Fired.com
- 2008 Domain Dunce Awards: Verizon
- Frank Schilling and John Berryhill team up to get RDNH decision
Tags: John Berryhill
I may not know when 2010 eventually rolls around, but at least I’ll still be 39 years old!
When “The Pope” dropped his .NET (not his .COM) zillions of people turned out the lights on the .NET TLD.
.NET is not even resolved or routed in the new CPE DNS. If you own the .COM your nameservers are queried FIRST for the .NET. You have first-right-of-refusal WITHOUT a registration.
.COM is King. The Pope knows that.
http://globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/GI.20091230.escenic_1415235/GIStory/
John: Happy New year and I can totally emphasize. Sometimes we get so consumed by protecting our client’s interest, we have no time to protect our own
Then again, John lives purely on his reputation. Have you seen his johnberryhill.com web site? John. It’s almost 2010. It is all about development!~
I was in the car telephone industry years ago (1954 circa), and John reminds me of one of the early lawyers in that business. He was a brilliant man who attended the early (and I mean early when their were only 20 people in the room. Everyone knew and respected his opinion. He made early law in that business and helped many of us out. His cases are still quoted today.
We can all be thankful for John and his help. I can assure you his work has made the road easier for us to travel. Happy New Year John, and Thank you.
The best part of the story is that on arrival in Gold Coast, I immediately checked into the wrong hotel.
On the subject of attorney websites in general, though, I love how every law firm website extolls the virtues of marvelous attorneys who seemingly never lose. When the phone stops ringing, I’ll give it some thought.
I’ll say this, though, I never thought of buying “Ari Goldberger” as a Google ad keyword, as someone once did.
Enrico, anyone can “emphasize.”
But I wonder if you can empathize?
If you can, then stop excepting reverse domain hijacking cases. It is beneath you.
Of course I meant accepting
John, if you accidentally dropped your domain name-sake, that might be an unforgivable mortal sin. Heh.
“But I wonder if you can empathize?”
Lawyers?
One of my early lessons came about years ago when I had drafted a letter to a client of the firm at which I was employed. Summarizing our view of the situation, I said, “We feel…”
My mentor crossed out the word “feel” and replaced it with “believe”, saying, “We’re lawyers. We don’t feel.”