This case was over before it even began.

I was scratching my head when I saw that someone had filed a UDRP against the owner of PaperSnowflake.com. Who in the world would go after a generic name like that?

We now have the answer, but I’m still scratching my head.

Patricia Kelley, who owns PaperSnowflakes.com (plural), filed the case. She operates a web site that instructs people on how to create paper snowflakes. With the help of counsel, she tried to argue that she had common law rights in Papersnowflakes.com, and that the singular version was confusingly similar.

The panel didn’t buy it, and Kelley didn’t even meet the first requirement to win a UDRP.

What’s amazing to me is that the owner of PaperSnowflakes.com apparently offered to sell the domain to Kelley for $2,000. That’s a great price, and the domain would probably fetch at least that much on the market. It’s also probably less than what she spent filing the UDRP and hiring a lawyer.

The respondent asked for a finding of reverse domain name hijacking. Panelist Alistair Payne neglected to consider the issue.

X.info will be available soon.

.Info registry Afilias is asking ICANN to approve a plan to offer one and two character .info domain names for registration. As with other newer gTLDs, ICANN originally reserved all one and two character domains from being registered.

Afilias is modeling its plan after Neustar’s launch of one and two character .biz domain names. There will be a three step process:

1. Requests for Proposal, where anyone can submit a proposal for developing a particular name. Afilias will award domains to RFPs that meet its goal of broadening awareness of .info.

2. Auction of any domain not given during the RFP

3. Open registration

During Neustar’s one character auction, the top sale was e.biz for $66,001. Many other one character .biz domains sold for $5,000-$15,000. It is still running two character auctions, with most sales under $1,000. The biggest deal to come out of the RFP process was Overstock.com, which picked up O.biz.

ICANN has opened a comment period about Afilias’ proposal, but I see no reason it would be denied in the wake of the .biz release.

Yahoo-Microsoft payday for domainers is finally within view.

It’s getting closer.

Yahoo and Microsoft have announced they’ve cleared U.S. and European regulatory requirements for their search partnership.

The first change will be that Bing’s search results will start showing up on Yahoo search pages. That means one less search engine to optimize for.

The good news for domain name parking is that later this year — or perhaps in early 2011 — the Yahoo and Microsoft advertising marketplaces will merge. This means more advertisers bidding on the same keywords for a bigger slice of the search ad market. That pushes up bid prices and covered keywords, which should mean more money for parked domains. As Yahoo tells it, the combination “will create more advertiser competition for placement and broader keyword coverage, resulting in potentially better monetization for you.”

It’s been a long wait, and we’re not there yet, but it’s getting closer.

A move at the top for ‘best conference’.

For the first time ever, DOMAINfest has been selected as the top domain name industry conference by respondents in the annual Domain Name Wire Survey.

DOMAINfest received 45% of the vote, knocking TRAFFIC off its perch. Here’s how they stacked up:

1. DOMAINfest 45%
2. TRAFFIC 36%
3. Domain Roundtable 7%
4. Domainer Mardi Gras 6%
GEOdomain Expo 6%

DOMAINfest carries an even bigger lead when it comes to the percentage of attendees who rate it best. This is a good measure of a conference’s popularity because it takes into consideration differences in the number of attendees who took the DNW survey:

Of those people who have attended DOMAINfest, 69% selected it as the best conference. 48% of those who have attended TRAFFIC picked it as best. By this measure, Domainer Mardi Gras is a crowd favorite, too, with 43% of people who have attended the conference rating it best.

The domain conference agenda is as busy as ever this year. With more European shows on tap, we’ll expand the survey lineup for next year.

For more survey results, visit DomainNameWire.com/survey.

Application filed nearly a decade ago covers domain name title insurance.

Over the past few years, a number of domain industry experts have been calling for domain name title insurance. The basic idea is that a title search would be run on previous owners of a domain name to make sure it hasn’t been stolen, and insurance issued. A domain buyer (or financier) could use this to warrant against buying a stolen domain.

So I was surprised to see that someone thought of this a decade ago and filed a patent application on the idea.

U.S. Application Ser. No. 10/301,206 was filed November 21, 2002 for “Intellectual Property Asset Title Insurance”, based on a provisional patent application filed in 2001. (The same inventors filed a divisional patent that was published today.) It describes a method for creating title insurance for a number of intellectual property asset classes, including domain names.

I’m not sure if there’s a market for domain name title insurance yet, but it would certainly open up the finance community to lending more on domain names and give domain buyers peace of mind.