[LA.pm] Need some advice

[William Reardon]

Side note:  I don't think anything on the
acatysmoof.com<http://openwebmail.acatysmoof.com/> page
warning users that the openwebmail.org is not legitimate.  You may want to
consider doing so & ask people to link to your page instead.  (Or possibly
change the name of the project all together.)

-Bill

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 9:48 AM, Jeremy Leader <jleader at alumni.caltech.edu>wrote:

> 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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