I don't see any bad press for us here... Doesn't sound like we did
anything wrong - except be involved.
Besides - all coverage is good for a company ;)
Charles Daminato
TUCOWS Product Manager
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Mon, 30 Apr 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Not the best PR for OpenSRS.
>
> Hijacked domain returned to rightful owner
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/18619.html
>
> The case of the dropped domain and the PR company that we covered last week
> has been sorted out - with it returning to the original owners.
>
> Last Monday, we revealed how Portfolio Metrica were aghast when their company
> Web site disappeared to be replaced with an American site offering free ISP
> access. We spoke to the site's new owner, Mark Duance, who claimed he had
> grabbed the domain www.portfoliocomms.com legally. On the Wednesday, he put
> the domain up for auction on eBay.
>
> Over the weekend, Portfolio Metrica managed to take back the domain and
> replace its original site by proving to Tucows (the new registrar) who they
> were. Mark Duane emailed us to register his displeasure.
>
> There are clearly several questions here: Was the domain legally re-
> registered? How does the change take place first of all? And what can
> companies and individuals do to make sure they don't wake up to the same
> scenario?
>
> Portfolio Metrica clearly feels it was badly done by and is overjoyed it has
> its domain back. "Our domain name was taken unlawfully," said company
> director Mark Westaby, "but we've got it back and we're very pleased about
> that."
>
> It would also appear that despite Mr Duane's assurance he did nothing wrong
> that the name was not legitimately taken. The problem lies in renewal
> notices. Because Portfolio Metrica's original registrar had gone bust, the
> forwarding information was somehow lost. Mr Duane re-registered one of
> Portfolio's domains and subsequently received the renewal notices. Thus he
> became aware of the other domains that Portfolio had registered - including
> portfoliocomms.com.
>
> Obviously this raises an enormous number of legal and protocol questions. One
> apparent expert on such matters backed up the resulting decision to hand back
> the domain to Portfolio. The new whois did not offer a new registration
> date. "The domain was re-registered on opensrs," said Domaingator on
> Afternic.com. "Opensrs automatically creates a NEW date the date it was re-
> registered if the name was actually expired (ie., released by Network
> Solutions Inc). No exceptions. The April date likewise is suspicious. The
> name was ON Hold for Payment but was not yet released by NSI. Case closed."
>
> Despite this, it would seem that we are looking in the mouth of an enormous
> increase in these types of problems as the two-year renewal date arrives for
> most companies' Web sites. Software is freely available on the Internet
> which, with a bit of know-how, can get you first to any dropped names. It is
> clear that the Internet's DNS is not sufficiently water-tight to prevent
> argument of rightful owner of a particular Web site.
>
> Unless someone - the NSI basically - gets their act in order, this will
> become a big, big problem (maybe NSI is too busy working out how it entrench
> itself in the .com domain to bother actually running it).
>
> You heard it here first. �
>
