Woman sues ICANN over expired domains; case gets snarled in Florida bankruptcy case.

An impoverished woman has sued ICANN in Oregon over expired domain names, and now the non-profit finds itself having to file a brief in a Florida bankruptcy court.

Denise Subramaniam sued ICANN in Oregon back in March over domain names she registered for clients that expired. She says the domain registrar became insolvent and that ICANN didn’t do a good enough job enforcing its accreditation requirements for the registrar. (lawsuit pdf)

She’s asking for $5,887,500.

With regards to the Oregon case, ICANN writes:

Plaintiff sued the wrong party, in the wrong jurisdiction, and under the wrong statutes because Oregon lacks personal jurisdiction over ICANN and ICANN has no connection to Plaintiff’s alleged injuries.

The Oregon lawsuit also named the owner of the domain name registrar, who’s now bankrupt. The trustee for the bankrupt party then filed a notice of removal directly to Bankruptcy Court in Florida. So ICANN was forced to file a 20 page plus rationale (pdf) for why the removal to bankruptcy court was wrong all the way across the country.

Ouch.

Company files several domain name disputes.

Local deals site LivingSocial has finally discovered that it has typosquatters — and that there’s a relatively affordable way to get its domain names back.

Earlier this month it filed its first domain name arbitration case, going against the Irish country code domain name LivingSocial.ie.

Now it’s ramping up its efforts by filing three cases with National Arbitration Forum this week. Each case costs about $1500 in filing fees plus legal costs.

Two of the cases deal with typosquatting including livingsocail.com and livingsocia.com.

The third case is for three domains that tack on “instant” to LivingSocial:

livingsocialinstantdeal.com
livingsocialinstantdeals.com
livingsocialinstant.com

There’s one other domain owner that should be careful. LivingSocal.com doesn’t have to be a typo; it could be for “Living Southern California”, kind of like SoCalTech.com. But the parked page on the domain is showing ads for daily deals. They should change that as soon as possible.

A review of this week’s domain sales at Sedo.

Apparently my review of Afternic sales earlier today in which I showed who the buyers were struck a chord. I’d like to do the same thing with Sedo’s results, except that most of the domains are still in escrow whenever they send out their list.

But I’ll try, and perhaps sometimes I’ll go back and pull in some sales from the previous week that now have updated whois information.

Here’s a match made in heaven: ABC School Equipment bought MarkerBoards.com for $13,500. Seems like a great deal to me, although I suppose many people refer to them as white boards.

A Brazilian company called Tropical Food Machinery paid $1,150 to get the .com equivalent of its country code domain name tropicalfood.com.br.

A small Tennessee software company called QR4 Technologies Inc. paid just $800 for Qr4.com.

Oh, what about that big one? Michael Berkens already wrote about WellnessFinder.com, although I received a higher purchase price from Sedo — a whopping 300,000 EUR.

Here are other notable sales from Sedo this week:

.com
dje.com 32000 EUR
famigo.com 25000 USD
criminology.com 24000 USD
giftfactory.com 23000 USD
service4u.com 13000 USD
playvision.com 12500 USD
internetmuseum.com 10000 EUR
cityvision.com 6090 EUR
dadan.com 5888 EUR
usls.com 5355 USD
elluchador.com 5128 USD
folia.com 5000 USD
erly.com 5000 USD
chefpro.com 5000 USD
marketwizards.com 5000 USD
anivet.com 5000 USD
artface.com 5000 USD

ccTLD
backupplan.co.uk 20000 USD
servers.eu 12500 EUR
xv.ca 12000 USD
pof.co.uk 11000 USD
orlandoholidays.co.uk 10000 EUR
pay.co.uk 7525 GBP
photobox.at 6000 EUR
juegosdemario.mx 5990 EUR
edd.co.uk 5500 GBP
edates.de 5500 EUR
body-lounge.de 5000 EUR
newsletter.eu 5000 EUR
donuts.co 5000 USD
cheapoair.es 5000 USD
carbon.ch 4500 EUR

Other
firstwebhosting.net 18000 USD
pof.biz 8000 EUR
ddos.net 7500 USD
messengerplus.net 6750 EUR
mh.net 5600 USD

A look at end user domain buyers from the past week.

Afternic’s extended network of domain name sales sites brings in end users. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of the company’s $600,000+ in domain sales for the past week and who the buyers were.

Consulting firm Bain bought Repeatability.com for $4,000. Sounds like a strategic consulting name to me!

Monarch Mortgage upgraded its domain name from MonarchMtg.com to MonarchMortgage.com for only $15,000.

Online car auction site Copart paid $26,056 to buy SellCar.com from iREIT.

RV and camping e-commerce store CampingWorld.com bought RiderWorld.com for $2,100. That’s a cheap price to enter a new shopping category!

Trade union NY Hotel Trades Council bought HotelWorkers.com for only $2,960, which is probably less than union dues for one person for a year.

The UK owner of Investmentland.com paid $2,688 for the .org version of his domain name. Maybe instead of investing in land, people should invest in domain names.

Avere Systems paid $2,810 for avere.net. They haven’t yet been able to buy Avere.com.

New top level domain names in just six minutes.

Last week ICANN published a video explaining what new top level domain names are and what they mean to companies and businesses that might want to apply for one.

I think it does a good job of describing what new top level domains are and explains some of the challenges applicants face — including steep fees and a long wait. Of course there are many more challenges than what you can explain in a short video, but I think this is a good initiator.

What do you think?