Moniker founder says Oversee.net contract with Google violated in Moniker acquisition.

Monte Cahn has filed a response (pdf) to Oversee.net’s motion to dismiss certain claims he brought against his former employer.

One of the more interesting claims in his response relates to the Moniker acquisition from Seevast and how it may have violated Oversee.net’s contract with ad provider Google:

Additionally, since filing the First Amended Complaint, it has come to our attention that there was a contract in place between Google and Oversee during the time Oversee was negotiating with Seevast and Cahn, which Defendants had knowledge of, and which directly effected Cahn’s performance under the MIP. We are of the understanding and belief that the acquisition of Moniker was in direct violation of the Google contract, and therefore Cahn never even had the ability to earn the $13 million bonus.

Oversee.net’s contract with Google is for domain name parking. This could be related to Moniker’s TrafficClub monetization service. Oversee.net shut down this service after the acquisition and migrated customers to DomainSponsor instead. Although TrafficClub was a “split testing” service for domain parking, it was down to basically one parking provider at the time of acquisition.

.Biz registration and renewal prices increase in six months.

Neustar has informed its registrars and ICANN that it will increase its annual prices for .biz domain names effective February 1, 2012. The new price will be $7.85, or 55 cents more than the current $7.30 per year. That’s about 7.5%.

This wholesale price does not include ICANN’s 18 cent “tax” per domain year registered.

Neustar’s notice to ICANN does not include a reason for the price increase.

Price increases from leading registries Neustar, VeriSign, and Afilias might come under more scrutiny as they begin offering registry services to third parties applying for new top level domain names. If they offer services for $2 per domain, it may become harder to justify the prices they charge for incumbent domain names.

But I doubt ICANN will pay attention. It just renewed VeriSign’s .net contract with 10% annual price increases…without justification for those increases.

Company stunningly loses a domain arbitration case over HPPre.com.

With the HP Pre 3 getting ready to hit the market, HP filed a domain name dispute with National Arbitration Forum to get the domain name HPPre.com.

Here’s what happened:

-The day after HP announced its acquisition of Palm (maker of the Pre), the registrant registered the domain name

-The registrant created a splog at the domain name that grabbed stories about Palm products from sites such as Engadget

-The registrant added Adsense ads to the splog to monetize it

A slam dunk for HP, right? Amazingly, no.

I’m really scratching my head on this one as it seems to contradict just about every similar UDRP I’ve reviewed.

According to panelist Jeffrey M. Samuels, if you register a domain name to provide a “news and commentary” splog on the trademarked product and place ads on the site, you can still be making “legitimate noncommercial or fair use of the domain name”.

Samuels wrote “Respondent’s use of the disputed domain name was not motivated substantially out of economic interest but, rather, out of an interest in providing a repository for comments regarding IT products”.

By that logic you can go out and “front run” multiple products that may be released in the future or name changes as the result of mergers, create an automated and ad-supported site on the domain, and you’ll be free and clear.

Hmm.

I suspect this isn’t the last we’ll here about this domain name.

CEO and president to leave one of domain name industry’s biggest companies.

Oversee.net CEO Jeff Kupietzky will depart the company at the end of the August, the company has announced. He will be moving his family to Israel.

Kupietzky has been with the company for five years, with the last 2 1/2 years as CEO and President.

Going forward, day-to-day operations will be handled by Co-Presidents Debra Domeyer and Scott Morrow.

Kupietzky has had to manage a number of tough changes to the domain name business in recent years as well as company scandals (e.g. SnapNames insider bidding scandal).

Although the company has had its share of both good and bad press, Kupietzky did a lot of good for the industry. He represented the industry to the media with professionalism, often scoring key mass media interviews.

The announcement comes about a month after three top executives left the company.

Lawsuit goes after typosquatters who redirect to survey offers.

As reported on Elliot’s Blog today, Facebook has filed a lawsuit against dozens of people for allegedly typosquatting on its domain names.

One of the interesting aspects of this case is what the defendants are allegedly doing with the domain names. Instead of parking them with traditional pay-per-click providers, they are forwarding them to survey sites that mimic Facebook in some way.

This type of typo monetization is becoming more popular as the opportunity to monetize some typos is limited on traditional parking platforms. In fact, there’s an entire parking company based around these CPA survey offers that started business just a couple months ago.

If seeing a parked page with pay-per-click links bothers trademark holders, they’ll be even more upset about seeing their would-be visitors tricked into supplying their email address to an affiliate site.