Tag: Domain Names

Another company that apparently wants to set up its users for e-mail scams is Dotster.

So I get this e-mail saying I’ve got an important secure message from Doster I need to reply to. But the URL directs me to a URL at registerapi.com. I’m assuming this is fake, but no, it’s completely legitimate (notice, though, that that also does not use the Dotster.Com domain name).

I cannot begin to express just how idiotic I think that is. Again, if I were a scammer I’d be setting up Dotster lookalike site to lure people to give up their passwords and other information.

If I had managed to register PETA.Com, I would be clearly be violating PETA’s trademark. But what if I have a path on my web site such as http://www.animalrights.net/peta/? Is that a trademark violation?

Believe it or not somebody actually tried to sue on just that issue. Interactive Products Corp., which manufacturers the Lap Traveler laptop stand sue A2ZSolutions.Com over a URL that that included /laptraveler/. A2ZSolutions had been selling the Lap Traveler, but when IPC told it to stop, it sold a competing product using the same URL. In many Internet searches for “Lap Traveler”, the A2ZSolutions.Com site had a very high listing. So Interactive Products Corp. sued?

A court rejected the lawsuit saying,

[T]o succeed on nay of its trademark claims at issue in this appeal, IPC must show that the presence of its trademark in the post-domain path of a2z’s portable-computer-stan web page is likely to cause confusion among consumers regarding the orign of the goods offered by the parties.

[I]n this case, there is a preliminary question about whether defendandts are using the challenged mark in a way that identifies the source of their goods. If defendants are only using IPC’s trademark in a ‘non-trademark’ way — that is, in a way that does not identify the source of a product — then trademark and false designation of origin laws do not apply.

Stated another way, the issues is whether a consumer is likely to notice ‘laptraveler’ in teh post-domain path and then thinkt hat the Mobile Desk may be produced by the same compay (or a company affiliated with the company) that makes the Lap Traveler.

. . .

Because post-domain paths do not typically signify source, it is unlikely that the presence of another’s trademark in a post-domain path of a URL woudl ever violate trademark law.

In any case, the court went on to note, IPC didn’t bother to actually produce an evidence that such a confusion was likely, and its appeal was rejected.

Source:

Sixth Circuit finds no trademark violation in post-domain paths. Steven Wu, LawMeme, April 12, 2003.

So I mentioned earlier that I received an e-mail when I renewed my domain name thanking me for extending it to 2004. So I hit reply to that message from Verisign and asked them why their automated systems think the domain name expires in 2003 but their customer service reps. tell me it expired in 2002. Here’s the e-mail reply I received for my trouble,

Thank you for contacting VeriSign!

The email addresses [email protected] and [email protected] are no longer active.

Please re-submit your inquiry to http://www.netsol.com/en_US/contactus.jhtml or go to our website at http://www.netsol.com and click on the “Contact Us” link at the bottom of the page in the red bar.

** Though your inquiry is important to us, replies to this email will not receive a response, as the address has been deactivated. Please do not reply to this email. **

If it’s inactive, why is Verisign still using the address? Sheesh, these people are even more clueless than my cable company.

Much of my weekend was spent sending expletive-filled e-mails to “customer service” folks at Verisign. I literally cannot believe how one organization could be that incompetent — at times they were approaching WorldCom-esque proportions in the creative way they were keeping track of my domain name.

Okay, this story goes back a few weeks to when Macrobyte had its outage. I realized at that time that I didn’t have control over my main domain name, Carnell.Com. Why? Because it was registered to [email protected], and since that address wasn’t working, I couldn’t approve any changes via e-mail.

I also couldn’t make any changes at Verisign’s site, because in all its wisdom the company had assigned me not one, not two, but three separate account numbers and passwords without ever telling me. There’s supposed to be a challenge question there, but none existed for my account (the person I talked to about this was nice enough to admit my records were likely screwed up during past database migrations).

Anyway, so Macrobyte gets up and the first thing I want to do is move the domain from Verisign, which I do not trust, to Dotster. So I fill out a transfer request form, approve it — and get back this message that says I cannot transfer Carnell.Com because it expired in February 2002. I found that odd since a WHOIS query of Network Solutions database says that it doesn’t expire until February 2003.

So once again I’m on the phone with customer service. They tell me what the e-mail message from Verisign said — the domain name expired on February 2002. The woman adds in a cheery voice that it’s my lucky day because the domain name is still available if I want it.

Still available? WTF? Their own WHOIS database says I own it until February 2003. Doesn’t that mean anything? Actually, no. The customer service representative tells me that they don’t rely on the WHOIS database at all because there are so many errors in it.

Oh yeah, that really inspired more confidence in Verisign’s business practices.

So the bottom line is that when I renewed the domain name in 2001, somehow in the WHOIS database the expiration date was erroneously set to 2003. So when February 2002 came around they never invoiced me, I didn’t pay, and the real database they use (as opposed to the nonsense they put in their WHOIS system) knows this. So my only option is to renew with these folks and then transfer my domain name.

I did that this morning, but I’m skeptical if it will work. After I hit the final submit button to pay for a one year renewal, I received an e-mail about the renewal. It thanked me for extending my domain name registration to 2004!

A post at Metafilter just nails the perfect analogy for Versign’s incompetent and borderline fradulent customer disservice,

Renew! Renew! Just like people entering the carousel in Logan’s Run, people who renew their domains with Verisign/Network Solutions aren’t getting what they think they’re getting.

Absolutely. Between the deceptive renewal notices they’ve been flooding me with via snail-mail and the crap they’ve pulled on other domain holders, I’ve been busy switching all of my domain names to a competitor that seems to take security and customer service seriously.