Charity sues company that bought domain name for $55,000 in NameJet domain name auction.

Non-profit Goodwill Industries International has sued the owner of Goodwill.com for alleged trademark infringement. The lawsuit (pdf) names Cyber2Media, Inc., the owner of the domain, and Oversee.net, which briefly monetized the domain on its DomainSponsor platform, as defendants.

For years, the domain name Goodwill.com was used by Goodwill Group, Inc., a Japanese staffing company. Goodwill Industries notes that it didn’t believe Goodwill Group was using the domain in bad faith. But then Goodwill Group changed its name and let the domain name expire.

Domain name registrar Network Solutions sent the domain name to an expired domain auction earlier this month on NameJet. Goodwill Industries contacted Network Solutions to try to stop the auction from taking place, but was unsuccessful. The winning bid was $55,000. (DNJournal reports the winning bid in this week’s sales report as $55,978.)

After winning the auction, the lawsuit alleges that Cyber2Media parked the domain name with links related to charitable giving. Goodwill Industries claims this has caused severe damage since December is a busy month for charitable giving.

The domain was originally parked at DomainSponsor, but is now parked with an eNom service.

Goodwill Industries claims trademark infringement, unfair competition, violation of the anti-cybersquatting protection act, interference with prospective economic advantage, and unjust enrichment. Goodwill is seeking transfer of the domain name and economic damages.

Bido added a number of new features today.

Credit domain name auction site Bido with constantly tweaking (or overhauling) its site in response to feedback.

Today the company announced a number of new changes:

1. Name your starting price. No more $28 minimum/maximum. A lower minimum will likely result in more votes.

2. Vote for profits. If an auction you vote for goes to auction and sells, you get a cut of Bido’s commission. The goal is to incentivize you to participate in voting. You only have a certain number of votes you can use.

3. BuyItNow pricing. It costs one Bido credit to set a buy it now price.

4. Negotiations. Negotiate on prices instead of going to an auction.

I like these ideas, especially naming your starting price. I also like voter profit sharing. My only worry — that I’ve voiced before — is that Bido is getting to complicated. Its initial success was due to its simplicity.

A few quick ways to make sure I don’t follow you on Twitter.

I use twitter daily. Not only do I post my recent blog posts, interesting articles, retweets of other’s tweets, and my thoughts, but I use it to get story ideas.

But I have a few pet peeves:

1. My main pet peeve is someone who follows you just to try to get you to follow them back. Follow me because you’re interested in what I have to say, not because you want me to follow you back. The worst are people that follow you and notice you aren’t following them back, who then unfollow and refollow to try to get your attention again.

2. Another pet peeve sure to get you unfollowed is posting too often. There’s no magic number to me, but I’ve unfollowed a lot of people who tweet every few minutes (unless I find them very relevant).

3. The third pet peeve is the person who only posts ads about their business. Like this one. That doesn’t add value.

So here’s how I decide to follow someone back that follows me. First, if I know the person or company I’ll likely follow them back. But 99% of the time I don’t. So then I look at two numbers: number of followers and number following. The ratio is what’s important. If they are following more people than are following them, that’s a red flag. That’s a good sign they aren’t very interesting.

Right now I have about 1,000 followers and I’m following 126 people. That’s about 10 to 1. When I see someone who’s following 1,000 people and only has 100 followers, that’s a red flag, and I won’t follow them back.

What are some of your pet peeves on twitter? How do you decide who to follow?

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Live consultation to settle differences on domain name registry agreement.

ICANN has scheduled a live consultation regarding the new top level domain name registry agreement for Thursday, 7 January 2010. The goal of the consultation is to discuss open issues in the agreement including: the process for amending the agreement, aspects of registry services reviews, and registry/registrar separation.

One other major issue that should be discussed: (lack of) limits on how registries can price domain registrations. Although ICANN has made some improvements to the language on price controls, there is still the danger of this spilling over to .com domain names. That would mean VeriSign could charge whatever it wants for .com domain names and renewals.

Limited in-person attendance is available in Washington, D.C., but everyone can participate via a phone bridge and web meeting. To participate, you need to send an email to registry-liaison@icann.org by December 28.

Charity domain name auction underway.

The WhyPark charity auction is now live, and I can think of a couple good reasons to participate.

First is that all auction proceeds go to charity. For me, December is a month of giving. Although I donate to charities throughout the year, my wife and I are sure to make our big donations before the end of the year. In this auction, the person who places the single highest bid in the entire auction gets to choose the charity that will receive all proceeds.

Second, you get to try out a brand new domain name auction platform at Latonas.com. It’s in beta, so go easy on it. (For some reason, many domainers don’t understand what “beta” means, so Rick took a risk by putting this out there.) But my first impressions are very positive. It looks upscale and each domain gets its own page that includes stats.

The auction ends this Thursday Friday (U.S. time).