Q: Don't you know that you could throw some ads up and make money?
A: Yes, I know, thank you. For those who feel they need more advertising in their life, please have a look at our swanky Electronic Frontier Foundation ad below.
Its free money but it makes the world a sader place. Like how enacted liability claims forced lawyers to force organisations to get insurance which forced unprofitable activities that couldn't justify the cost to cease.
Like the egg and spoon race in my local town that used to occur for children every year. That ceased around the 2000's.
The late 90's/2000's was when the bad "sue for everything" habit came from over the pond and the thousands of extra lawyers (trained by our desire for more people to go to university) suddenly needed to find work.
Also this is when driving insurance premiums skyrocketed because suddenly everyone was claiming for whiplash because it was "free money" that we all have to collectively pay back.
Some things that appear free are not really free, I guess that's my point.
> Q: Don't you know that you could throw some ads up and make money?
> A: Yes, I know, thank you. For those who feel they need more advertising in their life, please have a look at our swanky Electronic Frontier Foundation ad below.
I would be tempted to implement a custom SMTP server that accepts every email as if that target mailbox exists and collect them on a nosql db (just for curiosity and technical challenge) though I have no idea if I'd face any legal issues.
It's called Catch-All; I have it set up for my Google For Work account (e.g. I have a gmail that receives @my domain). So, you could use gmail to catch all e-mails to @gail.com; no need for a 'custom SMTP server'.
I know; was just an example of an available 'Catch-All' solution.
Back in the day™ I wrote a C# dll to add the functionality to my Exchange server (was not an option back then; don't know if it's possible out of the box now). There are many solutions once you know what to look for (e.g. the phrase 'Catch-All')
I think he means that "why would you?" is not good legal advice.
I mean, I agree with you in principle, but I can imagine some backwater judge deciding that Alice Techie was violating the privacy of Bob D. Luddite by accepting emails addressed to bob.d.luddite@alicetechie.com.
I made a service that does this ( https://disposeamail.com/ ), and I am constantly asking myself if it's worth it. The PostgreSQL database takes up over half the disk space on the VPS I run it on, and that's only after a few months. And of course it's almost all ultra low quality spam.
Good question - I had probably hit enter for `gail.com` having typed it out at one point - then muscle memory of typing `gmai` + enter -> google suggest = 'gail.com'
I think you couldn't make much money out of this anyway. 5k daily visitors sounds decent, but they are of low "quality": They quickly leave and would generate bad click-through rates. It would probably yield less than $100 a month.
You could probably just redirect all emails to @gmail.com, and most users would be none the wiser. Then you'd be able to trivially do password resets on any accounts that were created with the typo domain.
They were sent to you, you have a right to sell them (so long as you're in a one-party-consent state when it comes to recording). You're up to snuff law-wise.
The DOJ only prosecutes a few hundred of these cases per year. You'd need to do a lot of phishing, or something special in order to get their attention, I suspect.
That's not what the parent comment said at all. They're lower quality visitors because they don't have a genuine interest in "gail.com", they most likely wanted to go to "gmail.com" and mistyped (hence the name of the post). Once they see it's not actually Gmail, most will bounce pretty quickly.
So you can have a last name, use it as your trademark first, file all sorts of documents, get two domains, and then be put through the hoops by a forign company?
That's crazy. This guy whould have been awarded damages. He was the first to use Nissan in America before the auto-company in 1984.
It's the same reason we don't have Burger King in Australia. We have Hungry Jack's.
When burger king tried to start its brand in Australia way back when, they were unable to register the burger king licence in all states because in one state a man already had a long running burger place by that name.
So instead of having every state bar one with burger kings, they instead opted for a new name entirely.
> A: You can chase the purple squirrel. He is animated against a purple background. Click on him to win. The game restarts immediately after each win, only the squirrel knows.
That poor squirrel. All those losses, and no one to share them with?
There should be a purple countdown, and if the squirrel makes it to the end of the time limit without being caught/clicked on, the squirrel wins. Then the timer resets and a new game starts. Games that are impossible for one party to win are no fun.
The UDRP process is a joke and they got lucky with one panelist. Best go with three and an attorney.
They're easily leaving over US$ 500 a day on the table, for many years. Even if you hate advertising, take the money and donate to some charity. There are many who can use that kind of funds.
$100 CPMs? No way. With 5k uniques per day, maybe he'd make $5 a day with low quality, quick-leaving traffic. Unless he were to do shady stuff like affiliate redirects to gail.de or something.
> Even if you hate advertising, take the money and donate to some charity. There are many who can use that kind of funds.
It's terrible, all these people with houses in prominent traffic locations and people driving vehicles in high density urban environments, who refuse to place advertising all over their property. So much money being left on the table - even at low ad rates - they could be helping the less fortunate with those billions of collective ad dollars.
I once worked with a guy who had a domain that is the name of a major bank in my country (i.e. he owned {bank_name}.xyz and the bank's domain is {bank_name}-bank.xyz). Somehow he managed to hold on to it over the years.
Anyway, he had a catch-all email account for the domain, an sometimes interesting stuff would arrive. One day he showed me an email he had just received from a major investment firm that read more or less like this:
> Hey Jane, what's up?
> So I need to transfer those $50M we talked about over the phone the other day, just wanted to confirm the account. It's 123456789, right? If not, do send me the account number. Thanks!
Of course he didn't even reply, but he said these things happened pretty often.
I'm sure a vast majority of it was phishing, but you may be surprised to know how many and how often people send info like that over unencrypted email.
I seriously doubt it was, at least not a blanket automated attempt aimed at multiple people.
It was years ago but IIRC, there were actual names and the email was clearly between two people who knew each other personally, contained phone numbers, etc. Also, it wasn't in English, so it wasn't some automated Nigerian scam or something like that for sure.
And if someone went through the trouble of obtaining so much intel (names, phones, company titles, bank branches, etc) - makes no sense they would then get the email wrong.
Also, at most the person sending the email would gain is some business bank account number, that's probably semi public knowledge anyway, without any authentication-enabling information.
This stuff is done by fax in my country to this very day, I'm not surprised at all that such an unencrypted mail was sent.
Typically inside a company (like a bank) there's an email client with a preconfigured contacts list linked to an AD server, the email client will write the email address for you.
So the probability of someone mistyping an email address inside the same company is, I'd say, low. Even lower if it's a recuring contact between two persons who know each others.
That's what's smelling here. You don't mispell an email address when you're replying or sending a message to someone you have an ongoing conversation with.
And if you receive that kind of email from outside the company... Well. That's phishing.
I am not saying your story is fake dvirsky if that's you get from my posts. It's just has all the hallmarks of something I trained people around me to notice.
I didn't think this is what you implied, but having seen the actual email, I also think the security bad practice was on the sender side, and this wasn't a phishing attempt.
> vii) it is unlikely that the Respondent was unaware of the Complainant’s trademark considering the fame and tradition of the trademark GAIL
I have personally never heard of GAIL and found it funny that this was part of the complaint. They even move on from "unlikely" to "fact" when accusing the owners of gail.com that they were acting in bad faith:
> Furthermore, because the Respondent registered the domain name exactly when the Complainant increased its sales of GAIL products to the United States, this should be identified as an abusive practice. Lastly, the Respondent knew about the existence of the Complainant and of its GAIL trademark and nevertheless proceeded with the registration of the domain name.
The owners of gail made a counter-claim:
> (d) Reverse Domain Name Hijacking
> The Respondent alleges that the Complainant is using the Policy in bad faith for reverse domain name hijacking.
The arbiters ended up deciding that the owners of gail.com had a "legitimate interest" in operating the domain name, so they didn't comment on GAIL's accusation of bad faith.
(As someone who really detests IP law in its various forms, I've always found it unnerving that domain names can be seized simply based on whether a third party thinks your use is "legitimate" or not.)
It is weird how DNS names can be legally reassigned. It's like being forced to move to a different street or something. Or to give up a neat phone number because another company has the same phoneword.
> A: If you consult with someone well versed in trademark law, they will tell you that you can't have an exclusive trademark on a common word or name. My husband and I successfully defended ourselves against an attempted domain takeover in 2006; see WIPO Case D2006-0655 for more information.
Even in France that wouldn't fly. Milka lost this case because besides having the milka.fr domains, her webdesign was using a color close to the brand one.
As a result the judges ruled that she was piggybacking on the established brand.
If her design was say green instead of purple, she would likely have won the trial.
I guess it depends on how common the name in question really is.
In Germany, a lawyer named Dr. Andreas Shell lost a five-year legal dispute against the petrol multinational and had to hand over "shell.de" in 2001. Amazingly, in 1996 Shell actually was offered the domain at cost, but showed no interest.
I never understand people that wouldn't sell something like this. So if Google offered you $500,000 you're not going to take it, just to make this stupid statement that you're against ads? Get real.
Sorry, but at some point logic and reason take over. No one's mentioning money grubbing capitalism here at the expense of someone else...
What we have here is literally a blank page, that offers no value to the reader. Perhaps if they showed something worthwhile I could understand.
Yet, It's only a pat-myself-on-the-back message how they defend their name.
So they USE the name to talk about how they're protecting the name. That's like people that make money teaching people how to make money.
Just take the damn money and use it for something good.
Edit: this is reminiscent of nissan.com ... he's selling computer repair for $50/hr... yet could sell his domain for millions. The main purpose of his site to primarily advertise how he's standing up to lawsuits.
How on earth could one do something "more productive, and helpful, to society" with gail.com that one couldn't do just as well or better with some other domain name?
Gail.com already has a large free pool of constant visitors through misspelling gmail.com.
This pool is much more diverse than through targeted marketing, etc.
The hostmaster could renovate and display, for example, an unknown, but horrible, misjustice going on with the world. Added with some instructions on how to help raise awareness and stop this misjustice and you have a more productive and helpful webpage, to society.
The hard part in raising awareness is getting people to see and acknowledge your message, with gail.com this is already taken care of.
So just because you have a sought-after domain name, you can turn it in to greatness just because... you have a special domain name? This argument feels very vague and hand-wavy. I imagine execution of a good idea could do much more for you than a fancy domain name.
There's no reason to personally insult the poster, especially with very inflammatory wording. Everyone is allowed to have their own opinions even if the rest of us disagree.
> What we have here is literally a blank page, that offers no value to the reader. Perhaps if they showed something worthwhile I could understand.
Domain names aren't just there to resolve IPs for the web. You can have any online service resolve to it. More specifically people often buy domain names just for personalised email.
It's also worth noting that your point is directly refuted by the very first QA on her FAQ:
> Q: Why isn't there any content here?
> A: All personal web content is hidden on back pages to conserve bandwidth.
DNS exists for more than just http and email too. I reckon you should learn more about how the technology works before telling other people how to run their lives and dispose of their private property. Or maybe... Just don't do those things at all.
I'm sorry to hear that, I hope they have better luck hiring in the future.
Why should someone have to serve http explaining to you what they're using their domain for? Why can't someone just have a domain for email and SSH and be left the fuck alone?
While the other person was way to negative in their response, I can definitely see their point. How does being a CTO automatically confer knowledge of how DNS works, especially in very technical detail? Seems to me a clear case of an appeal to authority argument, which is usually (and probably also in this case) a logical fallacy.
What would you do with an extra $500,000? Stop working? What if you love your work. Retire? What if you already have your old days planned? ... Buy a car? My car works just fine. Buy a new house? Already have a family one. Simply enjoy being rich? The money didn't even come from my hard work, dedication or skills.
So there's really no way for a company to take over a domain if they have a legitimate reason? My company's dot com shows what looks to be a low value video. I've reached out to the guy a few years ago and he simply replied that there were some things that money couldn't buy...
Petal.com if you're interested. I'd love to have that domain, and yeah it's affecting our brand.
There are ways but "I named my company after a common English word, someone already owns the domain for that word and it would benefit me to own it instead" is not a legitimate reason.
Agreed 100%. If your company was founded sometime after 2000 and you picked a name before registering that domain, you have no one to blame but yourself. You could say 2003 if you want to be generous.
There is a process you can go through with ICANN and WIPO if you feel that you both (a) have a legitimate claim to the domain name and (b) the current owner does not have a legitimate claim. If the panel sides with you, then the domain will be transferred to you.
Note that (b) is - intentionally - quite difficult to prove, and is designed to prevent overtly bad-faith cyber-squatting without allowing "he who came late to the game but has more money wins" type of reverse-hijacking.
Since "petal" is a common word that you chose to use, but did not invent or have worldwide common recognition with, you very likely won't have much of a chance of using the dispute resolution process to obtain petal.com.
Interesting article about the early days of domain ownership disputes here:
In Chrome, I clicked the "Prevent page from creating additional pop-ups." checkbox, and then closed the page normally. What browser are you using that doesn't have such an option?
165 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadBased on their IP, they are hosted on DigitalOcean where even the cheapest plan provides 1TB of transfer per month, so bandwidth is not an issue.
The late 90's/2000's was when the bad "sue for everything" habit came from over the pond and the thousands of extra lawyers (trained by our desire for more people to go to university) suddenly needed to find work. Also this is when driving insurance premiums skyrocketed because suddenly everyone was claiming for whiplash because it was "free money" that we all have to collectively pay back. Some things that appear free are not really free, I guess that's my point.
However check out what the owners say about it:
> Q: Are you interested in monetizing gail.com?
> A: No, but thanks for asking.
> Q: Don't you know that you could throw some ads up and make money?
> A: Yes, I know, thank you. For those who feel they need more advertising in their life, please have a look at our swanky Electronic Frontier Foundation ad below.
Back in the day™ I wrote a C# dll to add the functionality to my Exchange server (was not an option back then; don't know if it's possible out of the box now). There are many solutions once you know what to look for (e.g. the phrase 'Catch-All')
How much spam do you get from the Catch-All?
Why would you? It's standard practice to set up a catch-all for your domain and you can just configure postfix to do that.
I mean, I agree with you in principle, but I can imagine some backwater judge deciding that Alice Techie was violating the privacy of Bob D. Luddite by accepting emails addressed to bob.d.luddite@alicetechie.com.
It is when it is literally common practice. Similar to if someone were to ask if they'd get in legal trouble for breathing. Why would you?
I don't think it's actually illegal to do that. Just a bit morally off.
They were sent to you, you have a right to sell them (so long as you're in a one-party-consent state when it comes to recording). You're up to snuff law-wise.
Definetly a shady thing to do.
That's crazy. This guy whould have been awarded damages. He was the first to use Nissan in America before the auto-company in 1984.
Nissan (the car company) has been predatory and downright evil in their attempts to wrest nissan.com from Fred.
When burger king tried to start its brand in Australia way back when, they were unable to register the burger king licence in all states because in one state a man already had a long running burger place by that name.
So instead of having every state bar one with burger kings, they instead opted for a new name entirely.
"For images, the price is 0.10 per pixel per day. So an 88x31 tag (2728 pixels) would cost 272.80 per day."
> A: You can chase the purple squirrel. He is animated against a purple background. Click on him to win. The game restarts immediately after each win, only the squirrel knows.
That poor squirrel. All those losses, and no one to share them with?
There should be a purple countdown, and if the squirrel makes it to the end of the time limit without being caught/clicked on, the squirrel wins. Then the timer resets and a new game starts. Games that are impossible for one party to win are no fun.
They're easily leaving over US$ 500 a day on the table, for many years. Even if you hate advertising, take the money and donate to some charity. There are many who can use that kind of funds.
Wasteful.
It's terrible, all these people with houses in prominent traffic locations and people driving vehicles in high density urban environments, who refuse to place advertising all over their property. So much money being left on the table - even at low ad rates - they could be helping the less fortunate with those billions of collective ad dollars.
All those years ago a company paid me £15k to build them a website which they could update themselves.
So I turned WWWBoard into a kind of blog/publishing system for them and they loved it. Cha-ching! :)
Anyway, he had a catch-all email account for the domain, an sometimes interesting stuff would arrive. One day he showed me an email he had just received from a major investment firm that read more or less like this:
> Hey Jane, what's up?
> So I need to transfer those $50M we talked about over the phone the other day, just wanted to confirm the account. It's 123456789, right? If not, do send me the account number. Thanks!
Of course he didn't even reply, but he said these things happened pretty often.
An email trying to pass as a normal workplace email.
Names, addresses, social security numbers, etc.
It was years ago but IIRC, there were actual names and the email was clearly between two people who knew each other personally, contained phone numbers, etc. Also, it wasn't in English, so it wasn't some automated Nigerian scam or something like that for sure.
And if someone went through the trouble of obtaining so much intel (names, phones, company titles, bank branches, etc) - makes no sense they would then get the email wrong.
Also, at most the person sending the email would gain is some business bank account number, that's probably semi public knowledge anyway, without any authentication-enabling information.
This stuff is done by fax in my country to this very day, I'm not surprised at all that such an unencrypted mail was sent.
Typically inside a company (like a bank) there's an email client with a preconfigured contacts list linked to an AD server, the email client will write the email address for you.
So the probability of someone mistyping an email address inside the same company is, I'd say, low. Even lower if it's a recuring contact between two persons who know each others.
That's what's smelling here. You don't mispell an email address when you're replying or sending a message to someone you have an ongoing conversation with.
And if you receive that kind of email from outside the company... Well. That's phishing.
Also, for clarification, 12345678 wasn't the actual number, it was something that looked completely legit.
Some interesting excerpts:
> vii) it is unlikely that the Respondent was unaware of the Complainant’s trademark considering the fame and tradition of the trademark GAIL
I have personally never heard of GAIL and found it funny that this was part of the complaint. They even move on from "unlikely" to "fact" when accusing the owners of gail.com that they were acting in bad faith:
> Furthermore, because the Respondent registered the domain name exactly when the Complainant increased its sales of GAIL products to the United States, this should be identified as an abusive practice. Lastly, the Respondent knew about the existence of the Complainant and of its GAIL trademark and nevertheless proceeded with the registration of the domain name.
The owners of gail made a counter-claim:
> (d) Reverse Domain Name Hijacking
> The Respondent alleges that the Complainant is using the Policy in bad faith for reverse domain name hijacking.
The arbiters ended up deciding that the owners of gail.com had a "legitimate interest" in operating the domain name, so they didn't comment on GAIL's accusation of bad faith.
(As someone who really detests IP law in its various forms, I've always found it unnerving that domain names can be seized simply based on whether a third party thinks your use is "legitimate" or not.)
The best part is that the first result for "GAIL" isn't even this company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAIL
> A: If you consult with someone well versed in trademark law, they will tell you that you can't have an exclusive trademark on a common word or name. My husband and I successfully defended ourselves against an attempted domain takeover in 2006; see WIPO Case D2006-0655 for more information.
Well, it depends on the jurisdiction. In France, in the infamous "Milka" case, the opposite happened: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milka_contre_Kraft_Foods (french)
As a result the judges ruled that she was piggybacking on the established brand.
If her design was say green instead of purple, she would likely have won the trial.
Which most readers here can't understand. That's why I though it was important to stress it here.
In Germany, a lawyer named Dr. Andreas Shell lost a five-year legal dispute against the petrol multinational and had to hand over "shell.de" in 2001. Amazingly, in 1996 Shell actually was offered the domain at cost, but showed no interest.
Source, German only I am afraid: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/rechtsstreit-shell-gegen-...
What we have here is literally a blank page, that offers no value to the reader. Perhaps if they showed something worthwhile I could understand.
Yet, It's only a pat-myself-on-the-back message how they defend their name.
So they USE the name to talk about how they're protecting the name. That's like people that make money teaching people how to make money.
Just take the damn money and use it for something good.
Edit: this is reminiscent of nissan.com ... he's selling computer repair for $50/hr... yet could sell his domain for millions. The main purpose of his site to primarily advertise how he's standing up to lawsuits.
But with the limited nature of domain names, gail.com could definitely be used for something more productive, and helpful, to society.
Considering the state it's in now, you're looking at a large upper range.
I don't buy this argument at all.
This pool is much more diverse than through targeted marketing, etc.
The hostmaster could renovate and display, for example, an unknown, but horrible, misjustice going on with the world. Added with some instructions on how to help raise awareness and stop this misjustice and you have a more productive and helpful webpage, to society.
The hard part in raising awareness is getting people to see and acknowledge your message, with gail.com this is already taken care of.
I would argue that when someone tells you to “shut up and take his money” we are as far from reason as we’re going to get.
Also, what’s wrong with blank pages? I own multiple domains, some of which don’t even have any DNS records. So what? It’s my money that pays the fees.
Domain names aren't just there to resolve IPs for the web. You can have any online service resolve to it. More specifically people often buy domain names just for personalised email.
It's also worth noting that your point is directly refuted by the very first QA on her FAQ:
> Q: Why isn't there any content here?
> A: All personal web content is hidden on back pages to conserve bandwidth.
I'm sorry to hear that, I hope they have better luck hiring in the future.
Why should someone have to serve http explaining to you what they're using their domain for? Why can't someone just have a domain for email and SSH and be left the fuck alone?
The spirit is very worthwhile. The EFF img is awesome!
Not everyone enjoys having money.
Funnily, it's usually the people who already have more than enough.
And even for those who do, it tends to have declining marginal utility.
Note that (b) is - intentionally - quite difficult to prove, and is designed to prevent overtly bad-faith cyber-squatting without allowing "he who came late to the game but has more money wins" type of reverse-hijacking.
Since "petal" is a common word that you chose to use, but did not invent or have worldwide common recognition with, you very likely won't have much of a chance of using the dispute resolution process to obtain petal.com.
Interesting article about the early days of domain ownership disputes here:
http://www.americanbar.org/publications/communications_lawye...
Microsoft vs a High School Kid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._MikeRoweSoft
Google fails to win dispute for oogle.com: http://blog.dnattorney.com/2012/07/google-loses-ooglecom-dom...
Julia Roberts gets control of her namesake domain, but Bruce Springsteen does not: http://www.ivanhoffman.com/bruce.html
Nissan are also assholes. I was going to get a G35, but nope after their web nonsense: https://www.google.com/#q=nissan.com+lawsuit
It just takes over your browser and makes it impossible to close without killing the PID.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_vs._Nissan_Compu...