NBC Tries to Wriggle Out Of $1 Million Women.com Sale

NBC wants lawsuit over domain name dismissed.

NBC Universal has filed a motion to dismiss (pdf) a lawsuit filed by DONE! Ventures over DONE!’s failed purchase of Women.com. DONE! claims it had an agreement to buy women.com and women.net from NBC, and that NBC later backed out of the deal that was brokered by Sedo.

NBC’s first line of defense is that it hadn’t reached an agreement with DONE! because communications only referred to Women.com, not .net — so key terms hadn’t been agreed to:

The Complaint makes clear on its face that no binding contract was formed because there was no meeting of the minds on a material term: the property for sale. Plaintiff alleges that it made a $1 million offer for two domain names: women.com and women.net. Yet, the correspondence from the NBC Defendants’ broker, which Plaintiff attaches to the Complaint and specifically incorporates by reference, states that the NBC Defendants would accept $1 million for women.com alone. Thus, the parties never agreed on what could be purchased for the $1 million price.

Its second line of defense is that Sedo told DONE! it would need to complete a bill of sale with NBC before completing the transaction. NBC argues that no bill of sale was completed, so there was no breach of contract:

Further, the parties’ correspondence states that the NBC Defendants required specified information about the Plaintiff and the completion of a bill of sale before a deal could be consummated. As Plaintiff admits in the Complaint, no bill of sale was ever drafted or signed. Therefore, even if the parties had reached a meeting of the minds about what property was for sale and at what price, which they did not, at most, there was an unenforceable agreement to agree. Plaintiffs breach of contract claim thus fails as a matter of law.

If the court doesn’t buy either of these arguments, NBC wants it to move the case from California to New York.

So here’s the (literally) million dollar question: if DONE! would accept just the .com domain for $1 million, would NBC go through with it?