Domain Spats & Disputes

Domainer Greg Ricks has lost the 3-letter domain lti.com in a UDRP suit brought by a hotel company that is part of the LTI Internation Hotels Group, a German company that has been doing business for years with the domain lti.de.

Ricks had the domain parked and displaying advertising that included numerous ads for hotel and travel services, which, the panel held, created a “likelihood of confusion.”

Ricks, who is usually aggressive about defending his domains, did not respond to the WIPO complaint.

The full WIPO decision can be read here.

Meg Whitman, who stepped down as CEO of eBay earlier this year, has been considering running for California governor in the 2010 election. Since leaving her eBay post, Whitman has been serving as senior advisor to John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Although Whitman says she hasn’t yet made a decision about running, she wanted to register some appropriate domain names for her possible future campaign. She found that megwhitmanforgovernor.com, megwhitman2010.com, meg2010.com, whitmanforgovernor.com and whitman2010.com were all registered by a Thomas Hall back in January, just days after it was first reported that Whitman was considering a run for governor.

According to a report in the San Francisco Bee, Whitman has filed a UDRP petition with WIPO in a bid to wrest control of the domains from Hall. Whitman’s lawyers contacted Hall in June to demand that he turn over the domains to Whitman, the Bee said, but Hall declined.

Earlier this year, Whitman gained the domain megwhitman.com in an out-of-court settlement after filing a similar UDRP petition.

In late June, a group of hackers in Turkey highjacked the domains icann.com, icann.net, iana.com andiana-servers.com. ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and IANA is Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Together, these two organizations oversee the system that manages website nameserver and address information.

According to Zone H, the DNS records of the domains were redirected to point to hosting space at “atspace.com.” The hackers, a Turkish group called NetDevilz, posted this message at the redirected site:

“You think that you control the domains but you don’t! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don’t you believe us?”

NetDevilz was the same group that highjacked the PhotoBucket domain previously.

According to the NYTimes, ICANN blamed the highjacking on a hack into its registrar, which was register.com.

The Sarasota Association of Realtors first charged one of its members, Marc Rasmussen, with an ethics violations, and then, after losing that case, dragged him to an ICANN hearing to get control of his domain.

Even though he won the ethics hearing, Rasmussen lost the ICANN arbitration, which ordered that the domain be transferred to SAR. He has filed a federal lawsuit to regain/retain control of his domain. Then, even though Network Solutions, the registrar of the domain, told him they would keep it in place and locked until the litigation was over, NetSol almost immediately transferred the domain to SAR, which promptly began redirecting it to their own lame site.

Read more about it here and here.