Someone Reportedly Purchased Google Argentina Domain After Company Forgot To Renew on Time (mercopress.com) 35
After Google forgot to renew its Argentina domain, a user beat the firm into buying it for about $3.85. A report adds: However, minutes later after the manoeuvre, it was confirmed that Google has already recovered the domain. Users complained about the failure of the website for at least three hours, but when everyone suspected that the server had crashed, as is often the case, Kurona's (the protagonist in the story) posting on Twitter revealed the truth.
The domain name system is fragile (Score:2)
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I've argued for a link between domains and trademarks... register the trademark, get the domain that goes with it.
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You can't just trademark a name.
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Re:The domain name system is fragile (Score:4, Informative)
There are exceptions for 'famous marks', but in general your trademark only applies in a specific area of commerce. You could have a trademark on 'Joes' for a pizza company, and someone else could have a trademark on 'Joes' for an auto parts store. So who automatically gets the 'joes.com' domain?
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There are exceptions for 'famous marks', but in general your trademark only applies in a specific area of commerce. You could have a trademark on 'Joes' for a pizza company, and someone else could have a trademark on 'Joes' for an auto parts store. So who automatically gets the 'joes.com' domain?
You should ask Uzi Nissan, an Israeli immigrant who owns a little computer shop in North Carolina http://www.nissan.com/ [nissan.com] and a long legal history against a giant company that no longer wanted to be called Datsun.
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"Frankly, their lawsuit should net him millions in damages."
Okay, nice easy armchair thought, but how do you demonstrate millions in damages here?
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I can't believe I'd never seen that. That's amazing. I love this person. Uzi Nissan is absolutely right to tell them to pound sand in these circumstances. Frankly, their lawsuit should net him millions in damages.
What damages? Did he medically suffer as a result? Did his customers who were blissfully unaware decide to ditch him because Nissan Motors sued him? Did his wife leave him because she is a corporate apologist who didn't want him fighting the man?
The damages he should net is to cover his legal costs, time and lost income. If you think this is worth millions then *you* are part of what is wrong in America's legal system.
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There are exceptions for 'famous marks', but in general your trademark only applies in a specific area of commerce. You could have a trademark on 'Joes' for a pizza company, and someone else could have a trademark on 'Joes' for an auto parts store. So who automatically gets the 'joes.com' domain?
You should ask Uzi Nissan, an Israeli immigrant who owns a little computer shop in North Carolina http://www.nissan.com/ [nissan.com] and a long legal history against a giant company that no longer wanted to be called Datsun.
Unfortunately, he died last year.
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Oh ... well that sucks.
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Just a thought - those areas of commerce are called "classes" in trademark law. Would it be possible to create TLDs, or second-level domains under .us, for those classes? You would then have joes.restaurant.us, and joes.auto-repair.us, each available to whoever owns the trademark in those classes.
It would require some work to develop. For instance, class 43 is "Services for providing food and drink; temporary accommodation". That's a rather long domain, so we'd need .restaurant.us, .hotel.us, .motel.us,
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Except in practice, many companies overlap on NICE classifications and it's necessary to go down to an even more fine-grained basis to carve out areas of uniqueness. Not to mention, most companies are doing more than 1 activity, so trademarks will often span multiple classes, even though they may only designate one as their primary class. Then the next problem you have is that trademarks for most people start at the national level and work their way up. In Germany, for example, I first file with the DPMA, t
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Thanks for the details! I had a hunch my half-baked idea would be much more complicated under the surface. It still might be possible to make trademark-based domains, but it certainly won't be as clean as I'd hoped.
If he legally bought it then dispute resolution. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whilst I see how serious this could have been, had a malevolent actor got involved, it shows one thing very clearly:
* Nice to see it's one rule for the big guys, and another one for everyone else in the muck.
The user registered the domain, legally, after google let it go (and there would have been multiple warnings about that, google) and are in the wrong here. The proper process (which should have taken days) would be to follow the dispute resolution procedure, which obviously was ignored.
Instead, someone hit the "oh shit" button to rip the domain away from it's new owner.
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That won't work. Under Argentina's law and NIC.ar registration rules (specifically article 42), Google has the trademark and a legitimate use case and the registration caused damage to third parties.
Google could even sure the guy for damages and income lost for the tree hour downtime.
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would be to follow the dispute resolution procedure, which obviously was ignored.
I mean sure we could spend days doing pointless busy work which would lead to an outcome which all parties can predict with 100% accuracy... Or you can let dispute resolution work on actual disputed cases rather than completely frigging obvious ones that just fill up the backlog.
Unless that is the dispute resolution is run in an indian call centre which is judged on the speed and number of cases closed, in which case proceed. Gotta get those numbers up.
White Hat Hack (Score:2)
It's a white hat hack... I did it for a local charity that forgot to spell out its entire name in a URL, which lead to Google not responding to the full name until I registered the spelled out name it and put it on redirect.
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Really REALLY bad? We'll send RMS right over!
Can't believe this happened (Score:2)
How does Google not have all their domains set up with auto-renew and just have their account billed? It seems ridiculous that it would ever be possible for Google to let a domain expire. They should just renew automatically and require a huge paper trail to cancel a domain that they truly don't want anymore.
This isn't some guy making websites in his free time, who may not pay so you expire things automatically. This is Google, a 1.5 Trillion dollar company. Just keep their domains active forever and make t
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How does Google not have all their domains set up with auto-renew and just have their account billed?
That was the first thing I thought of too...how in the HELL did they not set up auto renew?
The mind boggles.
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> That was the first thing I thought of too...how in the HELL did they not set up auto renew?
Maybe the card was only good for ten years?
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Well Google has at least 2 employees, right? Maybe just maybe one of them could have been tasked with this as an action item.
Hell, for a measly $100K a year I'd watch their domain portfolio and make sure oopsies like this didn't happen.
Google crash (Score:1)
"but when everyone suspected that the server had crashed, as is often the case,"
Google Argentina crashes often?
Per linked article, the domain had not expired (Score:2)
> According to the Open Data Córdoba group (which is dedicated to tracking expired Argentine domains) Google's domain had not expired and, in fact, the expiration date was in July. But the group too was unable to explain what had happened or why.
Seems like an error in the registration service (Score:2)
Opportunity (Score:2)
Heh, it would have been awesome if he'd put up a page with Google ads on it and reaped a few million clicks. :)
Not true (Score:2)