This is what happens when you create a popular web site on something other than .com.

You should never start a mainstream web site on a .net domain. Or .org, .biz, .info, etc.

Unless you own the .com of the same name. Especially if the domain name you choose is generic. Unless you don’t care about losing traffic to the .com.

OK, so why the rant?

I just finished reading a UDRP case brought by First Showing, LLC, which owns FirstShowing.net.

FirstShowing.net has quite a following. Compete.com suggests it receives over 200,000 uniques a month.

But it’s a dot net.

So the owner wanted to get FirstShowing.com and filed a UDRP to do so. The .com was acquired by the respondent after FirstShowing.net was launched.

But this case would be very, very hard for First Showing, LLC to win. As a generic term with meaning, someone can rightfully own FirstShowing.com and use it for a similar purpose as FirstShowing.net. There would have to be evidence that First Showing had received some sort of acquired distinctiveness.

Had the domain been something not specifically about movies — such as AlsCoolSite.net — then it might have a claim if the owner of AlsCoolSite.com starts showing movie listings.

In this case, the owner of FirstShowing.net emailed the .com owner about buying the domain. Perhaps unhappy with the price, First Showing LLC filed the UDRP complaint.

The panel denied the complainant’s request, saying the domain wasn’t registered and used in bad faith. The complainant failed to show that it had common law rights in FirstShowing.net at the time the .com was registered. (Even if it had, I would hope the complainant would be required to show common law rights in First Showing, not FirstShowing.net.)

Attorney Brett Lewis represented the respondent.

Size of .cn registration base falls 75% from peak.

Thanks mostly to tighter controls and rules on registration, China’s .cn domain name count keeps falling.

According to data collected by HosterStats.com, there were about 3.5 million .cn domain names registered at the end of January.

That’s a far cry from the over 14 million .cn domain names that were registered at its peak in February 2009. At that point .cn had more registrations than any other country code top level domain.

In January 2010 China abruptly stopped overseas registrars from registering .cn domain names. This began a downward plummet in the number of domains registered.

New regulations required anyone who wanted to register a domain to show identification. Then in June 2010 .cn domain name holders were asked to confirm their registrant information directly with the registry within 15 days or risk losing their domains.

.Cn was very popular prior to the restrictions for a number of reasons. Most importantly, it was offered for about 14 cents per registration.

Domain name cookie sells for $280.

Domain name investor Justin Godfrey of DIS Inc./MiniSite.com was the winning bidder in the eBay auction for the Tucows/Open SRS commemorative cookie.

Last April I bought the cookie — which was made to commemorate Tucows hitting the 10 million domains milestone — in another charity auction.

But it was time to turn the cookie into more money for charity, so I put it back up on eBay last week.

Bidding quickly escalated and the price soared, selling for a final price of $280. Over 1,100 people viewed the auction on eBay.

The money will go to support Cheti School in Tanzania. The money might be used toward buying a bus, feeding a class of 50-60 kids for almost three weeks, or acquiring books for several classrooms.

Godfrey says he frequently gives back. “Any charity that benefits children will benefit all of our futures,” he said. Godfrey said he frequently donates to ProjectNightNight.org, another charity that helps children.

I’d like to extend thanks to everyone who bid in the auction or helped promote it.

If you missed out but would still like to support Cheti, drop me a note and I’ll put you in touch with Mary Klingensmith with SponsorCheti.org.

Now, when will that 11 millionth domain cookie be baked?

Large wireless company sues in effort to get Cricket.com domain name.

Cricket Communications filed a lawsuit on Friday in U.S. District Court – Southern District of California in an effort to get the domain name Cricket.com (pdf).

Cricket uses MyCricket.com as its primary domain name.

Cricket Communications filed a UDRP case against domain name owner Global Cricket Ventures in December. Cricket Communications decided to file the lawsuit after Global Cricket Ventures responded defiantly to the UDRP.

History

Cricket.com has an interesting history.

It was a crown jewel domain name owned by Communicate.com (now Live Current Media). The company monetized the domain name as a parked page. In 2007 it was the company’s top earning parked page, earning in excess of $5,000 a month. The company purportedly turned down a $6 million offer for the domain.

With a good Cricket sports domain in hand, the company went down a disastrous path inking a deal to run a cricket site for Indian Premier League (IPL). The deal didn’t involve Cricket.com, but the CEO at the time said owning the domain got the attention of IPL.

After losing lots of money in the deal, Live Current Media ended up selling the domain name along with certain rights under its cricket deal to Global Cricket Ventures (GCV). GCV raised $10 million in funding in 2009.

Today

These days Cricket.com is a fairly bare site offering information about the sport of cricket. It also has a fantasy cricket league.

But according to Cricket Communications this is all a ruse in an effort to earn click-through and referral fees on wireless ads. The contextual ads on the site are all related to mobile devices (at least what I’m seeing in the U.S.).

And perhaps more damning, Cricket Communications alleges that the company placed a Cricket Communications logo directly above one of the skyscraper banner ads on the site. This made it look like the logo was part of the ad. But in a screenshot captured by the company, it appears the logo (that no longer appears) was a separate graphic. Also, the “cricket” news feed for the site includes a number of stories related to Cricket Communications.

Cricket Communications claims GCV included content related to Cricket Wireless to get better search rankings from the term, and turn visitors into ad revenue.

A Bungled Opportunity

Without knowing all the facts I don’t want to pass judgment. But I will say this — if Global Cricket Ventures wanted to get value out of this domain name as a sports destination, then it wasn’t a great steward of the domain. Between contextual ads and a (now removed) affiliate ad for wireless services, it handed a war chest of evidence to Cricket Communications.

Including its history of under usage at Live Current and the current mess, I’d say Cricket.com is a bungled opportunity for one of the web’s most valuable domain names.

Activist UDRP panelist at it again in 7s.com case.

If you ever need to point a finger at UDRP panelists that are trying to pervert the entire system, one of those should be Andrew Christie.

I awarded Christie a “Domain Dunce” award in 2009 for his attempts to change the plain language and thousands of cases of precedent of UDRP. He did it by circularly referencing his own cases.

Now Christie is at it again in the case of 7s.com.

The owner of the domain name had a pretty solid defense against the complaint by 7(S) Personal GmbH.

- 7s.com didn’t file trademarks until 2000 and provided no evidence that it had common law trademark rights to ’7s’ predating that. But 7s.com’s owner registered the domain name in 1998, two years before that.

- In addition to registering 7s.com, the respondent registered a number of other short domains that included numbers in the same year: 8r.com, j4.com, 788.com, 889.com, 988.com, e88.com, e99.com. This suggests that he was registering lots of short domains like this and wasn’t targeting the German company. (After all, there’s no evidence in the case that the German company even existed in 1998!)

- The domain owner had forwarded the domain to one of his sites (geometry.net) for several years after registering it.

- It’s a generic domain name

The majority of the panel found that the domain owner had rights or legitimate interests in the domain name.

But not Andrew Christie. He wrote a dissent:

…Where a domain name is used simply to point to a website, I believe there needs to be some semantic relationship between the domain name and the website for that use to be bona fide. To hold otherwise would mean that pointing a domain name to any website – including to a website completely unrelated, in a semantic sense, to the domain name – will trigger a right or legitimate interest in the domain name. In my view, that type of use is not sufficient to give rise to a right or legitimate interest in a domain name. It is not a bona fide use; rather it is an arbitrary use…

But another panelist gave a great rebuttal to Christie. David E. Sorkin wrote:

I concur in the majority’s decision. I agree with the view expressed in the dissenting opinion that an arbitrary use of a domain name normally does not create rights or legitimate interests. In this case, however, we are presented with such use of the disputed domain name over a long period of time, together with the paucity of evidence that the use was pretextual or otherwise illegitimate. (The Respondent need not show that it has developed trademark rights in the domain name, but merely that the Complainant has failed to prove that the Respondent has developed any sort of rights or legitimate interests in the name). Furthermore, there is no indication whatsoever that the Respondent’s selection of the domain name was motivated in any way by or targeted at the Complainant or its mark. I therefore conclude that the Complainant has failed to meet its burden of proving the requirements set forth in paragraph 4(b) of the Policy.