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Lawsuit claims Verisign shouldn’t have transferred domain name

by — Policy & Law 0 Comments

Suit alleges that domain name wasn’t owned by defendants named in class action.

Screenshot of Radaris.com

Bitseller, a company in Cyprus, says that Verisign shouldn’t have transferred the domain name Radaris.com as requested by a court and is asking (pdf) for at least $500,000 in damages.

The backstory is interesting. In 2014, attorneys filed a class action lawsuit against organizations that is said were running Radaris.com. The lawsuit claimed that Radaris, which aggregates public information about individuals and businesses, was not complying with the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

In 2017 the court issued a default judgment against the defendants in that case and ordered Radaris.com to be transferred to the plaintiffs. The domain’s registrar, EuroDNS, refused to transfer the domain. So, according to the new lawsuit, the plaintiffs took their court order to Verisign and got the domain transferred.

Bitseller says that it operates the Radaris website and that the domain is registered by a company called Accuracy Consulting. Historical Whois information supports that Accuracy Consulting was the registrant of the domain.

Yet, despite neither Bitseller nor Accuracy being named in the original lawsuit, the domain was transferred. Bitseller and Accuracy got the court in the class action case to determine that the domain should be returned.

Bitseller eventually got the name back but argues that it suffered great losses from not having the domain name. It says that Verisign could have easily verified that Accuracy was not named in the lawsuit.

Verisign’s defense in this case will likely be that it was just complying with a court order as it always does. That court ordered stated:

To the extent that the registrars do not assist in changing the registrars of record for the domains under their control within 1 business day of receipt of this Order, the top-level domain (TLD) registrars [sic] (or their administrators) for the Subject Domain Names within 5 business days of receipt of this Order shall change or assist in changing the registrars of record for the Subject Domain Names to a registrar of Plaintiffs’ choosing.

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Scratch.org owner defends domain name in court

by — Policy & Law 0 Comments

Ravi Lahoti says he has owned the domain since 1998.

Screenshot of the scratch.org website

An updated website at Scratch.org notes that it was registered in 1998 and includes the dictionary definition of the word.

Earlier this year Scratch Foundation, a non-profit that started at MIT, filed an in rem lawsuit (pdf) against the domain name Scratch.org claiming that the domain is cybersquatting.

In the complaint, Scratch Foundation said it reached out to the owner of the domain name in 2015 and offered under $5,000 for the name. According to the lawsuit, the owner asked for $450,000 and shortly thereafter started showing ads related to credit repair.

The owner of the domain name is now defending the domain name in court. Ravi Lahoti says (pdf) he registered the domain in 1998, which is well before Scratch Foundation was created in 2007.

If the name Lahoti looks familiar, that might be because Ravi Lahoti is the brother of UDRPSearch.com owner David Lahoti. A third brother, Raj Lahoti, runs DMV.org.

Last year, UDRPSearch.com forwarded to information about a lawsuit filed against Ravi, making it clear that his brother David took sides with the plaintiff.

In a filing yesterday, Ravi Lahoti asked that the Scratch.org lawsuit be transferred to California.

Ravi updated the site at Scratch.org recently to includes news articles and videos with the word scratch in them. It also has a notice that the domain was registered in 1998 and includes the dictionary definition of scratch.

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More cybersquatting cases but fewer domains at WIPO in 2018

by — Policy & Law 0 Comments

Filings up but number of domains down at largest UDRP organization.

Graph showing the number of domains subject to cybersquatting complaints at WIPO in 2018

WIPO heard 3,447 cybersquatting cases covering 5,655 domains in 2018. Chart courtesy WIPO.

World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has issued its annual release about how many cybersquatting cases it heard under UDRP and similar policies.

WIPO’s headline says it’s a record, and that’s true when considering the number of cases (3,447). But the number of domains involved (5,665) was only the third highest (see chart).

Another thing to point out is that there will be a lot of false headlines saying that cybersquatting has hit a new high. Remember that WIPO is just one of the providers for UDRP. It has tended to win more market share over time.

Also, case filings do not necessarily correlate to the amount of cybersquatting.

I expect UDRP filings to increase in 2019 because of GDPR. Companies that question whether a domain constitutes cybersquatting have difficulty figuring out if the registrant has rights or legitimate interests in the domain because they can’t research the registrant. They might be dissuaded from filing a complaint depending on who the owner is.

Of the 5,665 domains, 5022 were gTLDs and 633 were ccTLDs.

.Com, .Net and .Org were unsurprisingly the top gTLDs. .Nl, .Co and .Se led the way for ccTLDs.

According to RDNH.com, there were 28 reverse domain name hijacking findings at WIPO last year.

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The problem with price hikes on legacy TLDs

by — Policy & Law 18 Comments

ICANN logoIt should not be a goal to align legacy TLD policies with new TLD policies.

ICANN dropped a bombshell yesterday: it’s planning to remove all price controls on .org and .info domain names.

The organization justified this move by saying:

This change will not only allow the [.org/info] renewal agreement to better conform with the base registry agreement, but also takes into consideration the maturation of the domain name market and the goal of treating the Registry Operator equitably with registry operators of new gTLDs and other legacy gTLDs utilizing the base registry agreement.

The proposed agreement also adds Uniform Rapid Suspension, a trademark rights protection mechanism that was created as part of the new top level domain program. It allows trademark holders to quickly take down domains that are alleged to be cybersquatting. ICANN has previously added URS to several other top level domain contracts as they have renewed.

ICANN’s justification seems to be that all registries should play by the same rules. But this ignores the environment in which these domain names were launched and registered by customers. It is, in effect, a retroactive change to policy.

It’s true that new top level domain registries can jack up their prices as much as they want. However, compared to legacy TLDs, these price increases were allowed from the start. The most recent .org and .info registry agreements had price controls baked in that only allowed prices to increase 10% per year. That’s a lot, but it’s not unlimited.

So people who have registered .org and .info domains with the understanding that price increases would be capped are suddenly using domains that could theoretically cost thousands of dollars to renew.

While I doubt that Public Interest Registry (.org) and Afilias (.info) will increase prices that much, history tells us that the existing customers are the ones that will end up paying the higher prices. Registries generally discount first-year registrations, not renewals. So it’s reasonable to expect that these registries will increase the base cost going forward but then offer specials on new registrations.

ICANN notes that “Protections for existing registrants will remain in place, in line with the base registry agreement.” These protections are just allowing existing registrants to renew their domains for up to 10 years at current prices before price hikes take effect. That just kicks the can down the road.

One of ICANN’s missions is the stability of the DNS. Allowing uncapped price changes adds instability to the market behind it.

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Samsung tries to hijack GalaxyStore.com domain name

by — Policy & Law 5 Comments

Samsung files abusive cybersquatting complaint in an effort to get GalaxyStore.com domain name.

Logo for Samsung Galaxy Store

Samsung renamed its app store Galaxy Store but doesn’t have the matching domain name.

Samsung has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name GalaxyStore.com.

The electronics company changed the name of Galaxy Apps to Galaxy Store earlier this year and wanted the GalaxyStore.com domain name. However, the owner of GalaxyStore.com registered the domain name in 2004, at least five years before Samsung adopted the name Galaxy for its smartphones and tablets.

In other words, there’s no way the domain registrant registered the domain name with Samsung in mind. Nevertheless, Samsung filed a cybersquatting complaint under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) at Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre.

Because the domain registration pre-dated Samsung’s use of the Galaxy brand, the case was dead on arrival.

The domain owner’s counsel, Zak Muscovitch, warned Samsung’s counsel at Bae, Kim & Lee LLC IP Group about this critical fact and invited Samsung to withdraw the case. It didn’t, and the three-person UDRP panel found (pdf) Samsung to have filed the case in abuse of the policy, aka reverse domain name hijacking.

 

 

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