Domain investor and developer scores penalty against company that attempted reverse domain name hijacking.
A judge has awarded Scott Day’s DigiMedia.com LP $103,717.66 stemming from a finding of reverse domain name hijacking against GoForIt Entertainment (pdf).
GoForIt made an interesting claim against DigiMedia back in 2006. It filed a cyberpiracy lawsuit over a number of domain names, ranging from WebDesign.com to Recipes.com to Org.com.
GoForIt’s argument? If you navigated to its supposed trademark “goforit” as a third level domain name, e.g. goforit.webdesign.com, it resolved to a parked directory page that took advantage of its GoForIt mark.
Essentially the third level was wildcarded, so anything you typed before the second level domain would pull up a parked page.
GoForIt also sent a letter to DigiMedia’s domain registrar, Tucows, which resulted in DigiMedia’s domain names being locked. This made it difficult for DigiMedia to go forward with a number of domain sales and partnerships that were being negotiated.
DigiMedia counter sued GoForIt entertainment for Reverse Domain Name Hijacking and tortious interference with a contract. DigiMedia won a default judgment, and the judge spelled out the damages last week.
Org.com is huge. It’s up there with the old agoga cm thing. If you press shift+enter in IE’s address bar it automatically appends .com so if you don’t want to type extensions and just do like “dnw, shift+enter” it’s supposed to be a shortcut.
Well somehow I at least hit shift+enter a lot by accident when going to org domains which takes me to domain.org.com and I see that org.com lander at least once a week. I imagin across the entire Internet there is big volume.
@ jp – there were many others like that, which they sold before the suit was filed
Congrat’s to Scott Day.
That’s some of the best news in the industry in a long time.
Sounds like GoForIt are some real loser thieves at work. GoForIt are some real dirty dogs for trying that.
After the table was cleared in the summary judgment decision, this is the first case which ever proceeded solely on an RDNH claim.
I bet GoForIt can’t afford to pay the judgement, and their reg fee name will be auctioned off for $7.67 to go toward the judgement.
Default judgement meaning GoForIt didn’t dispute it, huh? Would’ve been interesting to see if they did.
Still, this decision’s an important one since others can now use this against arguably frivolous claims.
@Dave
GoForIt was the plaintiff in the action.
First they filed in Florida, ran out of money and their lawyers bailed on them. That action was dismissed.
Then, GoForIt found some contingent fee lawyers in Oklahoma. When the court threw out GoForIt’s claims and all that was left was the counterclaim, the Oklahoma ambulance chasers left the sinking ship like rats. They had argued against RDNH in the previous round of summary judgment motions and lost.
Having screwed over his first set of lawyers, and having sold a bag of smoke to the second set, GoForIt couldn’t find another attorney dumb enough to take the case.
You don’t often see the plaintiff get nailed with a default judgment against it.
Whoops, confused the plaintiff. But thanks for elaborating, John.