Warner Bros. wins domain name dispute for Hogwarts.com.

Children and dreamers interested in attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from the Harry Potter series will soon be able to find it more easily on the web — Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. has just been awarded the domain name Hogwarts.com through a UDRP.

Warner Bros. has rights dating from June 1, 1998 in which author J.K. Rowling granted and assigned to it rights in all four books in the Harry Potter series as of that date.

The respondent in this case registered the domain name April 20, 1999. Over time it has resolved to a number of different registrar parking pages featuring links to Harry Potter merchandise.

It didn’t take an act of wizardry for Warner Bros. to win this case. Still, why did it take so long for the company to go after this domain name?

New ownership, but a similar formula for Bido.

Social domain auction site Bido is back and under new ownership. There’s a familiar face at the helm, with Jarred Cohen returning as Chief Operating Officer. He’s a busy guy right now, but I was able to steal a few minutes of his time via email for an update:

DNW: Who bought Bido?

Cohen: The Bido software, website, and some other related assets were purchased by Bido.com LLC, a Switzerland company.

DNW: What is your involvement with Bido going forward?

Cohen: I continue just like in my former role as COO. I’ve taken a position as COO of the new company and I’ll be visible and accessible to our members on the front end as well as busy behind the scenes overseeing the development and business teams. I may be reached at jarred (at) bido.com.

DNW: What has happened to the platform (what’s been going on behind the scenes) since Bido shut down?

Cohen: It’s as you could imagine, a sale of such magnitude takes some time from start to finish. There are many steps along the way; there was a lot of paperwork, asset transfers, as well as setting up the Bido software and moving into a new server environment. In order to do all those things, we had to take a step back, keep our heads down, stay busy, and focus on the goal. Moving forward, we are glad to be back and once again open Bido up for the buyers and sellers in the domain community to utilize.

DNW: How will Bido be the same/different? Given what’s happened in the past, what will be different this time around in order to make it a profitable/sustainable venture?

Cohen: We’ll put focus on the most needed things and, with the support of the community, move to new heights. The core aspects of Bido remain for the most part the same. We will be optimizing things, simplifying some things, and making some changes with the formats, such as auction durations, and overall making it easier for people to buy and sell. What has happened in the past is behind us and we’re just looking ahead at the opportunity that awaits to get back into business and help a lot of people buy and sell. One of the changes you’ll notice right away is that we’re doing some experimentation and instead of running 1 hour auctions as we did in the past, the auctions will run for a longer duration of time. At first, you’ll see auctions that last 4 days and we’ll evaluate the feedback and results after some time. We’re also going to be starting and ending the auctions between the hours of 3pm to 4pm Eastern at first, and observing from there. The voting system (Vote For Profits) and the other core innovations that had always set us apart remain nearly the same. I would advise anyone reading to visit our site and take us up on a tour of the system to learn how it works.

Thank you Andrew for the opportunity for our voice to be heard on DomainNameWire, and we’re glad to be back.

Groups want moratorium on new UDRP providers until ICANN gets handle on them.

Both the ICANN Business Constituency and the Internet Commerce Association have asked ICANN to reject any applications from new UDRP providers until “ICANN implements a standard mechanism for establishing uniform rules and procedures and flexible means of delineating and enforcing arbitration provider responsibilities.”

The comments are in response to an application by Arab Center for Domain Name Dispute Resolution (ACDR) to become a UDRP provider for domain name disputes.

Internet Commerce Association Counsel Philip Corwin helped draft and work with the Business Constituency for its comments. ICANN has twice added the issue of control over UDRP providers to its board agenda. Nothing serious has come of it yet.

Additionally, ICA submitted its own comments specific to deficiencies in ACDR’s application.

The Intellectual Property Constituency also noted some deficiencies in ACDR’s application, although the majority of it is requests for ACDR to reduce some of its fees borne by complainants.

Frank Fowlie to leave ICANN role.

ICANN Ombudsman Frank Fowlie has announced he will leave his post no later than January 31 of next year.

In a statement posted to the ICANN web site today, Fowlie said “After six years with ICANN, I have logged 794 days in travel status, or about two years and five months away from home. It’s time for me to spend a bit more time at home with my wonderful wife.”

The statement is vague about whether Fowlie is leaving on his own accord, simply referring to it as a “departure” rather than resignation or termination.

Fowlie, who essentially is tasked with resolving disputes, caught fire this year for not handling his own dispute very well. He allegedly shouted at and cursed at an Air Canada employee after not receiving his proper meal. Once Fowlie arrived at his layover, he allegedly acted aggressively toward the ground manager. The crew for his next flight was told what happened, and the captain denied Fowlie access to the flight because he was a “risk of further disruption.” Security was called in.

Fowlie filed a complaint with Canadian Transportation Agency over the incident, but it ruled against him. He was embarrassed when the press caught wind of his dispute, and later (unsuccessfully) tried to have his name struck from the record.

As ICANN seeks to find a new ombudsman, I hope they take a hard look at the expense of having someone travel 794 days in six years.

Epik customers will get a free upgrade to full eCommerce stores.

You might think that today would be a dark day for Epik.com customers after a number of Epik Product Portals were de-indexed from Google. But after talking to Epik founder Rob Monster moments ago, it’s not the nightmare scenario you might imagine.

First things first, here’s what happened: a number of Epik-produced “Product Portals”, which include affiliate and CPC links to products, were de-indexed by Google within the past 24 hours. Not all of the sites were cut; I checked my three portals and two of them are still indexed. Traffic to the Epik network has fallen over the past day, but not by catastrophic numbers.

This is obviously bad news for anyone who’s product portal suddenly lost a great source of traffic. It’s unclear if this is temporary and if the portals will be added back into the index. But regardless, owners of these stores are about to get a nice gift: their product portals will be upgraded to full eCommerce stores at no charge. Epik will announce this tomorrow morning.

Epik has already created some of these stores, and planned to roll them out officially next quarter. But today’s events just moved that date up, and anyone who bought a $249 Product Portal may upgrade it to an eCommerce site for free rather than the standard $2500 price tag.

Besides the great features in the eCommerce platform, there are a couple things that will ensure they don’t meet the same fate with Google:

1. The content is richer and adds more value, making it more worthy of Google’s search engine love

2. The economics change. With a full store where you make a high margin on a $20 sale rather than get a small affiliate payment, you can make profitable media buys. You won’t rely just on Google for traffic.

Yes, today couldn’t have been a happy day for Epik. But I get the feeling Rob Monster had planned for the possibility. He planned for ways to depend less on search traffic.

And the company has plenty of capital — meaning something like this won’t bring the company to its knees.