

Godaddy not liable for cybersquatting, court rules - larrys
http://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2012/january-/domain-registrar-not-liable-for-cybersquatting-us-court-rules/

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res0nat0r
This sounds reasonable. I know the current trend this month is to hate on
GoDaddy because of it being Reddits cause of the week regarding SOPA, but in
reality a large company such as this can't prevent this type of infringement
due to it's customers acting in bad faith in an automated fashion. To enforce
this programatically I think would be extremely difficult, if not impossible,
hence why SOPA is a terrible bill. :)

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soult
As always with Godaddy, you need to take a look at the bigger picture.

A couple of years ago, a lot of domain tasting was going on. If you registered
a domain, you could "return" it within 7 days and get your money back. Bad
people abused this to "taste" how many visitors they would get, returning the
domain on the very last second. Sometimes they even registered and then
returned the domain multiple times in a row.

Bob Parsons, then CEO of Godaddy, was very outspoken against this practice
(after all, it made no money for domain registrars like him and occupied
domains that he could sell to his customers). Don't get me wrong, domain
tasting sucked, but it sucked especially for domain registrars. Thankfully a
change in registration rules has since stopped domain tasting.

Which is good for Godaddy, which is now one of the leading "domain parking"
and "domain aftermarket" registrars. Which means in layman's terms that they
are holding domains ransom for advertising revenue and on the chance that they
can squeeze a lot of money from whoever wants the domain. If you let a Godaddy
domain expire, chances are that they, knowing how much traffic it brought to
you, will renew it for themselves, slap ads on it and wait for some poor
schmuck to pay hundreds of dollars to get that domain.

So, to sum it up. Godaddy didn't like people squatting domains when there was
no money in it for them, but now they like it a lot because they get a lot of
money from it. You may think it is reasonable to not be liable for hosted
domains. In my opinion, Godaddy systematically caters to domain squatters, and
this should be punished. It's the same for spammers. You can't blame a webhost
if a spammer abuses his service, but a webhost that almost exclusively caters
to spammers must be stopped.

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res0nat0r
I thought I've heard of other registrars in the past basically doing something
similar, where they log your typo'd domain name due to their DNS redirect and
register the domain proactively in order to squat up and coming trends. Surely
GoDaddy isn't the only offender in this type of squatting? Not that they
should get a pass, but it seems like a problem with shady registrars overall.

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kaichanvong
Why did they not sue the individual responsible (Heiko Schoenekess) rather
than godaddy that simply enabled him to set up the redirects?

