Dell: Master of 4,264 Domain Names
Nathan J. Hole, the Loeb & Loeb attorney representing MGM in the effort to grab Wargames.Com, has won four more UDRP arbitrations the past eight weeks:
- Dell Inc. v. Gail Wright for the domains dellcart.com and dellpccart.com
- The National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Namia Limited for the domain frozenfour.com
- Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. fslc wf-b for the domain thepinkpanther.com
- Dell Inc. v. Oguz Ozdemir for the domain dellpc.net
In all four cases, domain owners didn't file a response, giving them no real chance of winning. This brings Hole's record to 13-0.
I've been a Dell shareholder since 2001, so Loeb & Loeb was working for me when it acquired the following domains for Dell through the UDRP process: dell4mecom.net, dellcart.com, dellcomputerssuck.com, dellcustomersupport.com, dellscomputer.com, delldvr.com, delldvr.net, delldvrs.com, delldvrs.net, delliran.com, dellpc.net, dellpccart.com, dellpromos.com, dellsite.com, dellsite.net, dellwork.com, dellworks.com, wwwdell4me.net, wwwdellcom.com, wwwdellcom.net, wwwdellcomputer.com and wwwdell4mecom.com.
These 22 domains were acquired in 11 UDRP cases that cost $16,900 in filing fees from the National Arbitration Forum plus whatever it costs to have a young attorney write sentences like "Respondent's vague allegations regarding his contemplated use of the Domain are contradicted by the manifest weight of objectively verifiable facts surrounding his registration and use."
None of the domains directs traffic to Dell today, and in two cases nobody bothered to update the name service after the UDRP ruling, so they continue to point to their former owners' web servers. If you visit dell4mecom.net and wwwdellcomputer.com today, you'll find parked pay-per-click pages on two servers that host 1.4 million and 44,000 domains, respectively.
Dell currently owns 4,264 domains according to DomainTools and appears on pace to add 1,000 a year. To give a sample of its thoroughness, the company owns dell-sucks.com, dellcomputerssuck.com, delldjdittysucks.com, dellhostsucks.com, dellservicesucks.net, dellsucks.org, dellsucksass.com, dellsucksnow.com and dellblows.com.
Dell has bigger problems than an addiction to domain names -- how do you say "please help, my Inspiron laptop incinerated my mantackle" in Hindi? -- but I'm not seeing the logic of a corporation hoarding thousands of useless and valueless domains related to its brands because some random idiot registered them. Dell's trying to corner the market on an infinite resource.
Amapedia: The Conspicuous Consumption Community Wiki
While browsing Amazon.Com this evening I noticed a reference to Amapedia, a collaborative wiki the company describes as a "community for sharing information about the products you like the most."
The site's newly launched, because there's not a single mention yet on Technorati or Google Blog Search and its About page was created five days ago.
Anyone with an Amazon.Com account can edit the site. Amapedia's list of do's and don'ts for "Amapedians" describes what it's hoping to cultivate:
Do:
- write about your favorite products
- find out what others' favorite products are
- quantify why you like or dislike a product as much as possible
- cite your sources
Do Not:
- self-promote by referring to yourself, your work, or your Web sites in any article
- store personal photos
- create a personal home page (we may support that in the future)
- talk in the first person in the main body of product articles (that's what the "Anecdotes, Experiences, Opinions, Comments" section is for)
- express personal opinions about things that are not products (i.e., while we are very interested in your opinion about a book about the Iraq war -- particularly so if you can calmly document specific good and bad points about it -- we are not at all interested in your personal opinions about the Iraq war itself on this site)
The project appears to have been under development since spring 2005. The domain name Amapedia.Com was registered April 25, 2005, using an anonymous proxy service and programmer Jonah Cohen, in an online resume, states that this was his job at Amazon.Com that year:
Software Design Engineer for Amazon.com. Summer 2005
Wrote large portions of production code for Amapedia, Wikipedia-inspired product website, using PHP and MySQL. Designed and implemented synonym-matching system for item types using Java and PostgreSQL.
There's not much to recommend yet in the wiki's user-generated content (cash register ka-ching!). When I created a new article on the Sonicare Elite 9800 Power Toothbrush I became credited as a "Contributing Amapedian" on my user profile.
I bought the $120 toothbrush because I'm overreacting to some expensive dental work I need. While receiving a crown this morning on one of my molars during a difficult 90-minute operation, my new dentist informed me that I have a "remarkably aggressive tongue."
I believe I've found Amapedia early enough that I can install myself as its leader and establish the community norms. Towards this end, I'd like all Amapedians to addressed me as Amazimbo, First Among Equals.
Wargames.Com UDRP Dispute Goes to Arbitrators
MGM's effort to grab Wargames.Com is now in the hands of a three-member panel of arbitrators for the National Arbitration Forum, who will read the filings of both sides and decide the matter in the next two weeks.
Under the forum's rules, each side got two chances to make its case:
- Dec. 19, 2006: MGM challenged my ownership of the domain in its original complaint, paying a $2,600 fee and requesting a three-member panel of arbitrators.
- Jan. 8, 2007: I made my response, which attorney Wade Duchene filed at the 20-day deadline. Because MGM requested a three-member panel, no fee was required. If MGM had selected a one-member panel for $1,300, I could've paid $1,300 for two more arbitrators.
- Jan. 16, 2007: MGM made an additional complaint, a response to my response that cost the studio $400. MGM only had five days to do this, but the last day can't fall on a weekend or holiday, so it got three additional days.
- Jan. 22, 2007: I offered a response to their response to my response, which was filed by Duchene and Brett E. Lewis, a former attorney for Register.Com who's won more than 20 UDRP disputes. This response also cost $400 and had a five-day deadline.
Lewis, an attorney whose bio claims he can "hypnotize opposing counsel with his brightly polished, gleaming bald head," wrote an article for the domain industry site DNJournal on how to protect your domain names. My favorite tip is that you should not pretend to be a cat.
The timing of this dispute worked out well for MGM, putting most of our work time in the Christmas holidays and giving the studio extra time for its additional complaint.
MGM's intellectual property firm Loeb & Loeb has become one of my weblog's most avid readers. Its second complaint includes screen captures of several weblog posts here on Workbench to pursue its claim that everything I've done on Wargames.Com is an attempt to hide a long-unrealized desire to profit from MGM's 1983 film:
When Respondent "launched" the <wargames.com> website on September 14, 2006, it did not even merit a mention on any of his websites. A printout from Respondent's blog showing entries from the days surrounding September 14, 2006, is attached as Annex E. In fact, during the three (3) months that elapsed between Respondent's first use of the <wargames.com> domain name and MGM's filing of this dispute, Respondent did not publicize, announce, or mention the activation of the <wargames.com> website. Indeed, the first public announcement of new <wargames.com> website was in connection with Respondent's blog post announcing that MGM filed the complaint in this proceeding (see Annex D). Thus, if Respondent is to be believed, after spending more than two (or eight) years and 1,000 hours developing the <wargames.com> website, he did not so much as mention when it finally went active. That Respondent only began to publicize his website after MGM initiated the instant proceeding betrays his claims regarding his efforts to develop an active website using the Domain, and further suggests opportunistic bad faith in attempting to capitalize on the dispute for his own financial benefit.
They overlooked the links to Wargames.Com in the "Working On" sidebar of this blog -- even in their own screen captures -- and wargame ads I've run on other sites I publish. Google has indexed more than 13,000 pages where I've linked to my store, an effort that takes 3-6 months to improve its standing in search results.
Both of MGM's documents are filled with stuff like this, where its attorneys take a thin inference from something I've written -- or in this case not written -- and stretch it into a Perry Mason moment where I break down on the stand and admit I killed kindly Miss McGillicutty for the $13 in her Little Sisters of the Poor donation bucket.
Dancing Mortgage People Ate My Brain
My weblog entry on protecting yourself from dancing mortgage people attracted the attention of New York Times reporter Brad Stone, who tracked down Jennifer Uhll, the graphic designer who created the ads for LowerMyBills.Com.
Whenever I see one of these ads, I'm reminded of the door-to-door meat salesmen who occasionally show up at my house offering steaks from a beer cooler in their trunk. Every time they do, I want to ask, "Who are the people keeping you in business?" I half expect to find they're also selling human organs for transplant.
I'll buy high-definition 1080i DirecTV from Jessica Simpson, but I'm not buying meat from some mullet-headed stranger's trunk and I won't trust a life-altering banking decision to creepy dancing silhoettes with undulating pelvi. The ads are so successful for the company it spent $74.6 million running the ads and was bought by Experian for $400 million in 2005.
The people have become so pervasive on newspaper sites that the Times had to admit it inflicts them on readers.
Stone did not pass along my warning to web users that the time has come to recognize the threat the dancers pose to humankind. We have to stop the rooftop couple, line-dancing cowboy clones and fist-pumping zombie Gregory Hines now, before LowerMyBills.Com and its minions unleash some new form of Lovecraftian brain-destroying contagion on the world in the name of affordable mortgage refinance.
UDRP Response Filed to Save Wargames.Com
My attorney Wade Duchene has filed our response to the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution (UDRP) complaint made by MGM Studios over Wargames.Com. We're getting closer to the day where a panel of three arbitrators decides whether to give the domain to MGM, which owns a trademark registered in 2003 for the 1983 film WarGames.
UDRP arbitration is an increasingly popular tool for intellectual property lawyers trying to acquire domains for clients, as MGM's firm is attempting here. If they lose, all it costs is a $1,300 or $2,600 filing fee and their time.
The math's not as pretty for a domain name holder: You have to fight like hell to defend your rights against accusations of cybersquatting and anything else an attorney can claim to make you look dodgy, and all you get with a victory is to keep what you owned in the first place.
Actually, that's not entirely true. There's at least one benefit to me: I'm making new friends at the OfficeMax copy center and UPS Store. When I showed up yesterday to make copies of the UDRP response for some reporters, they greeted me like Norm on Cheers.
I'm also getting a great too-late-for-me education on how to reduce your risk of a UDRP grab.
If you own a domain you haven't launched and there's a trademark holder with a mark close to your domain name, you're vulnerable even if you've never offered it for sale. The time to defend your rights is before you've been contacted by a trademark holder. In a UDRP arbitration, the actions you take after that first contact are disregarded as self-serving.
My emphatic advice: Start your business today. Don't wait until everything's perfectly in place and the site's near to launch.
I registered a fictitious name statement in Florida in 2004 when I began work on Wargames.Com, which is my first (and only) retail business. That's probably the first step you should undertake. You can register a fictitious name, also called a DBA or do-business-as, with a service like MyCorporation.Com or do it yourself with your state. I paid around $50.
Registering a fictitious name tells the world you'll be doing business under that name, establishing a verifiable public record of your intent. I'll pester my attorney to explain how that helps.
The Digger Diggs, and Having Dugg Moves On
When Ryan Tomayko's blog was linked recently on Digg, he was so freaked out by the experience he wrote some code to reject all Digg traffic:
The funny thing about Digg is that it changes the way people read. The average Digger seems to assume that people write stuff solely for the purpose of making it to the Digg front page. ...
No one knows you there so you have to write in a way that is completely void of who you are and what you're about. That sucks. I'd rather just opt out of the popularity contest (and I did -- see below).
I've been ground into chuck a few times by high-traffic sites, most recently over my legal fight to save Wargames.Com from being grabbed by MGM.
When an online community's focused on you, it feels like a big deal, but the average Internet user can afford to spend no more than 10 minutes caring about any subject. After that, a new "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" remix, Apple gadget, or high-resolution picture of a celebrity's babymaker has hit the web and everybody moves on. Digg users form six strongly held opinions an hour.
When I offered BenedictXVI.Com to the Vatican, this weblog received 500,000 hits in two days and I got several thousand comments along with six flattering sexual assessments (five straight, one gay). I was just starting to enjoy my newfound celebrity after 36 hours when some Canadian woman fell on the ice singing the National Anthem at a hockey game in Quebec, inhaling all my fame oxygen. I was so upset I couldn't start my day with the Today Show for weeks.
By the time Tomayko finished his Digg blocker, the members of the site had forgotten him entirely.
It's Not the Size of the Blog in the Fight ...
Wired News has declared Dave Winer vs. me as one of the top blogfights of 2006.
Back in early 2005, blogger and RSS guru Dave Winer hired programmer Rogers Cadenhead to port Winer's popular Weblogs.com site to a more robust platform. The project was a success -- Winer sold Weblogs.com to VeriSign for more than $2 million later that year -- and Winer struck a verbal agreement with Cadenhead to perform the same magic on another of Winer's web properties, Share My OPML. Winer paid Cadenhead $5,000 but the project fizzled when they couldn't agree on a formal contract. Then, in March 2006, Winer filed a lawsuit against Cadenhead demanding he delete the Share My OPML code and return the money. Cadenhead took it public, posting a letter he received from Winer's lawyer and calling Dave out. Winer responded with his own blog post slamming Cadenhead's ethics. The case was settled out of court; Cadenhead kept the money but deleted the code.
Winner: Cadenhead, who gets points for his innovative use of blogs to sway the court of public opinion. "I decided the best way to avoid court was to show Winer what it would be like to sue a blogger," he wrote.
I appreciate the victory, but I have a sneaking suspicion this honor is like being crowned king of the dipshits.
One of my New Year's resolutions is to avoid getting on this list again for 2007.
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