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29 May 2007
In a press release sent out this morning, Godaddy says they're the new registrar for Registerfly's former domains. Godaddy has their own issues, but they're one of the few registrars that could import that many domains quickly. This should solve the problem for the RF customers whose registration data is correctly transferred over. But it still leaves in limbo those whose domains went into redemption or expired due to RF's inability to process renewals. There also seem to be a fair number of domains whose contact info is wrong due to incompetence or malice at RF. There doesn't yet seem to be any plan to clean up the rest of the mess. There's nothing about this on the ICANN web site other than a blog entry on Friday proudly saying that they finally got RF's Kevin Medina to show up in court. Whoopee. But there's no reason to doubt what Godaddy has said.
25 May 2007
In an entry in the ICANN blog, Paul Levins says they've arranged to move Registerfly's domains to another registrar. They won't say who the other registrar is beyond "an existing accredited Registrar with a demonstrated record of customer service" which could be just about anyone other than Registerfly. They have "most" of the registrant data. All is to be unveiled next week. In the meantime, read the comments on the blog entry about domains that are expired, domains that have gone into the redemption period and eNom (for whom RF used to be a reseller) wants a large ransom, and other screwups. Even if the new registrar is utterly wonderful, there's going to be lots of pieces to pick up. (Thanks to Larry Seltzer who noticed the ICANN blog entry. He also noted that, astonishingly, Registerfly's web site still purports to sell domains and will take your money, although judging from the blog complaints, the actual process ends after the take your money part.)
10 May 2007
Forwarding e-mail is so easy that it must be legal, right? Not everyone thinks so. Ned Snow at the University of Arkansas recently wrote A Copyright Conundrum: Protecting Email Privacy that argues that forwarding violates the sender's copyright rights, so it's not. The article is quite clever and is (as best I can tell, not being a legal historian) well researched, even if you agree with me that its conclusions are a bunch of codswallop.
05 May 2007
Last December I wrote about Mark Mumma, who runs a small web hosting company in Oklahoma City and his battle with Omega World Travel a/k/a cruise.com. Mumma lost his CAN SPAM suit agains them in December, but Omega's countersuit for defamation went to trial last week, and I hear that the jury awarded Omega $2.5 million in damages, which Mumma is not likely to be able to pay. This may be painted in some circles as a huge defeat for anti-spam activists, but it's not. Mumma has been what one might call an intemperate litigant, as most impressively documented in an interview with Ken Magill. Press reports say that Omega would have settled with Mumma for an apology and no money, which considering Mumma's string of losses was a pretty good offer. But he didn't. There are plenty of real anti-spam lawsuits going on, with real charges of behavior that is actually prohibited by law. A good example is the case that Project Honeypot filed last week against spammers who'd scraped addresses off their honeypot web pages. I look forward to following its progress. Update: Read Robert Braver's comment on this message which clarifies the sequence of suits. Omega sued first in response to threats from Mumma, but the outcome is indeed a train wreck.
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