[LA.pm] Fwd: Need some advice

[Ron Stephan]

I had a domain roll out once.

(long story with odd vendor deleted here).

I was advised at the time (two years ago) that if you have the trademark you will eventually win it back.  

If you don't you are in a much tougher position.  

The bad news is your link-farmer does this for a living.  He probably knows the true value of your domain better than you do. 


Somebody up here must know a good attorney to go to on this.


Ron "Elvis" Stephan












Begin forwarded message:

> From: Jeremy Leader <jleader at alumni.caltech.edu>
> Date: November 1, 2010 9:48:51 AM PDT
> To: Alex Teslik <alex at acatysmoof.com>
> Cc: losangeles-pm at mail.pm.org
> Subject: Re: [LA.pm] Need some advice
> 
> I'm not sure how much recourse you have.  It probably depends how much of a paper trail you can show to demonstrate that you're the "real" OpenWebMail project.  If you can show that, and show that the project existed prior to his registration of the domain, you might be able to us the "Uniform Dispute Resolution Process" to get the domain away from him.  See http://www.icann.org/en/udrp/udrp.htm for the details; basically, you have to show that you had rights to the name before he registered the domain, and that he registered the domain in "bad faith".
> 
> You might also see if you can find an attorney familiar with domain names, and willing to advise you on a "pro bono" basis.
> 
> -- 
> Jeremy Leader
> jleader at alumni.caltech.edu
> 
> Alex Teslik wrote:
>> Hi LA.pm,
>>   I am the lead developer of OpenWebMail (http://openwebmail.acatysmoof.com)
>> and I need some advice. Our old homepage at openwebmail.org has been taken
>> hostage by the guy who registered it. He is now link-farming the site and
>> making quite a bit of money from the pagerank everyone's work has given his
>> domain (over $2400 this month so far). He will not grant us any access to
>> change the site and refuses to stop link-farming it.
>>   I've wanted to bring it up at several of the last meetings, but I've missed
>> them due to a new baby at home. I'd really appreciate your input as I'm not
>> sure what to do. We've got a release coming up after two years of hard work
>> and I'd really prefer not to fork the project. I've tried contacting google to
>> make them aware of his abuse of the pagerank that was built up by open source
>> contributors, to no avail.
>>   Is anyone aware of an open source project's homepage being hijacked like
>> this in the past? How did they handle it?
>> Thanks,
>> Alex
>> P.S.- You can see how much money he's made here:
>> http://www.openwebmail.org/donation
>> "support payments" he says :(
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