Pharma company loses key domain name.

[Update: Roche has won the domain arbitration.] Roche subsidiary 454 Life Sciences has lost control of its 454.com domain name and is asking a UDRP panel to help it get it back.

The history on 454.com is intriguing. Piecing it together with the help of DomainTools’ historical whois, there are several times over the past two years when this domain name may have been compromised. But earlier this month it suddenly was under a new name and forwarded to a Sedo parking page.

Roche was in control of the domain name as of March 31, 2010. The admin contact was global.domainmaster@roche.com although the whois had an invalid phone number. It also showed an old Network Solutions technical contact even though the domain was at eNom, so there was clearly some poor record keeping.

On April 16, 2010 the domain name moved out of Roche’s eNom reseller account. The registration services email changed to yves@goulnik.com.

Then on May 23, 2010 the whois record changed to a privacy service even though the nameservers stayed with Roche.

The domain came out from whois privacy on July 14, 2011. The whois record looked like it had before the domain name went into privacy in April 2010 with one subtle difference: the admin email was now global.domainmaster@roceh.com.

Notice the typo of Roche as Roceh?

Roche doesn’t own Roceh.com, which means the owner or Roceh.com basically could control the domain name. But it’s not clear that that lead to the domain changing hands, because the typo was fixed on July 31, 2011.

Then on September 5 the domain name suddenly changed to a new owner and pointed to Sedo domain parking.

How and when did Roche actually lose control of the domain name? It’s hard to tell. Perhaps the UDRP case will shed some more light on it.

Facebook makes intriguing domain registrations.

Facebook has yet to settle an ongoing trademark dispute with American Farm Bureau despite paying millions to buy the FB.com domain name from it.

Now Facebook may have upped the ante, registering FBPAC.org and FBPAC.us. The two domain names were previously registered to American Farm Bureau until they expired in 2009. American Farm Bureau owns FBPAC.com and FBPAC.net.

Although the farmer lobbying group doesn’t operate the domain names, it’s clear that PAC stands for Political Action Committee.

So this begs the question, what is Facebook’s interest in these domain names? I can think of two possibilities:

1. It wants to use them in it current tiff with American Farm Bureau.

2. It’s starting its own PAC.

Trying to get a domain name that existed before your trademark.

I’m a big supporter of intellectual property rights. Unfortunately I’m stuck writing more often about lawyers and companies that overstep their bounds.

The latest case: Smart Tax Holdings, LLC. The company filed a federal lawsuit (pdf) against Marchex for the domain name SmartTax.com.

The plaintiff started using the name “Smart Tax” in 2006 and filed a trademark on it. The trademark was granted in November 2008.

SmartTax.com was originally registered in 2000. It was part of the Ultimate Search portfolio later acquired by Marchex.

So Marchex has owned the domain name since well before Smart Tax Holdings, LLC even started using the Smart Tax term. Yet its lawyer has the gall to write this:

Defendant has not used Plaintiff’s mark coincidentally, but rather chose to associate Plaintiff’s mark with its own website for the sole purpose of unfairly steering traffic thereto.

How can you suggest that a company is “unfairly steering traffic” to a domain name it owned many years before you existed?

AdSense to show gambling ads, but with a number of caveats.

Google Adsense will start showing gambling ads on its publishers web sites starting September 27, but many people will never see them.

The ads will only show up for people visiting the site from a country where online gambling is legal. In other words, don’t expect to see them any time soon in the United States.

Also, ads won’t show up on a site unless the AdSense publisher has opted in to showing gambling ads. Only sites targeted to people 18 and up can opt-in.

Ironically, sites that allow gambling are not allowed to show AdSense ads.

But this change should be a boon to publishers that offer reviews and links to online gambling destinations. Perhaps for domain parking too?

A big milestone for the biggest domain name registrar.

The Go Daddy Group, which includes domain name registrar GoDaddy.com, is likely to cross the 50 million domain milestone next week.

The company hit 45 million domains registered just nine months ago in December.

The 50 million domains number represents the total number registered at a point in time. If you add up all the domains registered over time the number would be much higher.

As of the end of May GoDaddy.com had nearly 30 million .com domain names registered. (May is the latest month with actual data filed with ICANN.) That represents nearly a third of the .com base and more than three times as many as the nearest competitor, eNom.

Its share of newer top level domain names is even higher. In the same month GoDaddy.com had over 4 million .info domains registered out of a total of 7.4 million registered everywhere.

You can expect this number to jump when new top level domains are launched in a couple years.