

Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com - bigwill
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/13/dropbox-acquires-the-domain-everyone-thought-it-had-dropbox-com/

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vlad
First, Dropbox has not commented on why Dropbox.com redirects to them, nor
about their lawsuit of the domain owner. Therefore, this is a horrible news
article, with an assumption that Dropbox holds an new ownership stake in the
domain.

Second, it's actually quite possible Dropbox asked the .com holders to forward
traffic to the real site in order for both parties to value the domain's
contribution to downloads/upsales from type-in traffic (is it 90% new users?
Or almost always those who have an account?). This would mean TechCrunch hurts
Dropbox by increasing their cost to buy/license the domain.

Third, we can't tell who owns the domain, so it could still be the same party!
The .com could forward to the real site for just one day to tease Dropbox by
sending it visitors for just one day. This also means they could point to the
real site for a month, then a competitor later on after links start rolling
in.

Finally, I don't think this owner, nor Justintv.com, are cybersquatters since
they owned their domains since the 90's.

~~~
dzohrob
Evenflow owns dropbox.com now. Check <http://whois.sc/dropbox.com> .

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vlad
Yes, looks like the .com turned off Whois privacy, and Dropbox does own it now
(most Whois services still point to Domains by Proxy, including when I
checked). But since Dropbox didn't have a comment for TechCrunch on why the
domain pointed to the real site while it was still privacy-protected, the
headline of the article didn't make sense.

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anurag
From the PDF:

 __ _"21. Plaintiff has expended considerable time and effort promoting and
advertising Dropbox, using DROPBOX as its brand name. To date, Plaintiff has
spent in excess of $1 million dollars marketing the DROPBOX brand."_ __

They have $1.5m in funding (according to CrunchBase), and they've spent over a
million dollars on marketing already? There has to be an interesting story in
there somewhere.

~~~
harpastum
Seems like a pretty large number, but remember, funding isn't dropbox's only
source of income.

In addition, depending on the definition of 'marketing' (IANAL), the referral
engine (i.e. free space for referring other users), might count as marketing
the dropbox brand, and the 'value' of the free space would likely count as the
amount customers would have to pay, not the cost to dropbox.

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panic
It's worth mentioning that the first hit for "dropbox.com" on Google is the
actual site, "getdropbox.com". Many people navigate to a site by googling its
URL then clicking the first link.

~~~
eli
I doubt _most_ people navigate that way. Sure, plenty of browsers will do a
google search from the address bar but only if what you've typed doesn't
resolve on its own.

~~~
blasdel
You'd be surprised how far normal users will go out of their way to avoid the
address box, often using comically complex routines.

Google is much more trustworthy than DNS -- it's essentially content-
addressed.

~~~
kyro
Reminds me of the time I searched for 'Google' using my browser's Google
search, and then clicked on the first result to get to Google to search for
what I was looking for...

~~~
stcredzero
Makes me wonder what a Google Search for "Google Search" will yield? Is that a
new kind of Quine? (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)>)

Chuck Norris is the 3rd item!

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peterlai
At MIT's Startup Bootcamp, Kyle noted a similar squatter on
<http://justintv.com/>.

~~~
vlad
If so, then News.com is very succesfully cybersquatting Hacker News, in the
same way.

~~~
buugs
I think this would be more like if someone else owned bitly.com and raised the
price to 400,000 when everyone started using bit.ly

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willwagner
FWIW, I was trying to find out what the site looked like before this
kerfuffle. I only found this:

<http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://dropbox.com>

which doesn't show too much except for some godaddy.com domain parking.

If it was just a domain parked while the guy was trying to figure out what he
wanted to do with it, I'm not so excited about the outcome. If it was
misleading site pretending to be getdropbox.com, then that's a whole other
story.

There really needs to be a better system for domain name registration. I'm all
for inexpensive domain names but perhaps there should be some sort of waiting
list, and if people are on the waiting list, the renewal fees get raised by a
set amount each year (perhaps capped at something like 25%) as long as there
was a waiting list. Once the person doesn't renew, the first person on the
waiting list gets it but they get charged at the new rate.

In that way, you couldn't just squat on a domain without doing something with
it and eventually there would be a fair market price for it. If no one wanted
it, the price for the domain would stay low.

There is probably still some gaming in a system like that but at least it
would encourage more turnover of unused domains, which would be a good thing.

~~~
ars
When I saw it (not long ago), it was a completely empty page with a google
header.

~~~
xelfer
The page with the google header is what I saw 2 days ago.

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ujjwalg
It is unrelated to this post but, dropbox rocks. I have tried 4 different file
sharing services but dropbox simplicity and efficiency beats them all.

~~~
kyro
Haha. You know, this must really be an amazing company. I have never used the
product myself, but every time a post about Dropbox comes around, there are
always at least a few comments of people just wanting to mention how much they
love it, regardless of the actual submission topic.

~~~
lupin_sansei
[http://superuser.com/questions/4143/what-interesting-
types-o...](http://superuser.com/questions/4143/what-interesting-types-of-
things-can-dropbox-be-used-for/28651)

~~~
kyro
Wow, lots of really cool uses there. I like the torrenting one in particular.

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furriner
I wonder if this service is only available to US companies? If my foreign
company registers a trademark in my own country then finds a website that was
registered 9years ago will the US court force them to hand over the .com
domain?

~~~
lutorm
I think the key is the trademark confusion part. If you have a domain name
that was registered a long time ago and then realize that it's a name for some
successful business and _then_ start to use your domain name for something
related, then you are guilty of trademark infringement. If on the other hand
you've been running a business since before the other one started, then it's
_they_ who are guilty of infringement. If you own ibm.com for your business
"Indiana Boomerang Manufacturing, Inc.", IBM can't really push the trademark
infringement allegation because the risk of confusion is small. That's at
least my understanding of how trademarks work.

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jpeterson
So will dropbox.com redirect to getdropbox.com in perpetuity, or will you guys
eventually migrate over to the new domain?

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spicyj
I don't know who this "everyone" is who thought they owned the domain. I
certainly noticed before I signed up that they used a different domain.

That said, it's excellent that they get the domain that they deserve, which
will undoubtedly increase traffic and profit for the company.

~~~
timdorr
I'll admit that I fell for the wrong domain before.

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blasdel
I was just noticing earlier today how clumsy a dl.getdropbox.com/u/00000/file
URL looks

Feels weird being exhorted to "Get Dropbox" when I already using one...

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staunch
Like TheFacebook.com -> Facebook.com. Now we just have to wait for the $150+
million acquisition from HP or EMC.

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vaksel
so how much did you guys ended up paying(or was it free?)...or is this some
huge corporate secret

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eli
Sucks that it took lawyers, but good for them

~~~
greendestiny
Seems like the guy initially registered dropbox.com before anyone had heard of
it, not sure I think its a great thing. Surely you just call your company
something that you can get domain for. Well whatever really, I love dropbox
and this guy was just leeching off them.

~~~
pingswept
I met Drew, one of the founders of Dropbox, a few years ago at Barcamp Boston.
If I remember it right, he said that the initial dropbox.com owner was just
some random dude who was planning on starting some sort of venture related to
dropboxes, hadn't done it yet, but didn't want to sell. My impression was that
he got the domain some time before Dropbox launched, and at least initially,
he wasn't doing anything particularly irritating other than letting a short
domain name languish (not that bad, in the big picture).

From the PDF in the link, it sounds like the original owner then transferred
the domain to a third party, who then ran ads for Dropbox's competitors,
leading to the legal wrangling.

~~~
greendestiny
More or less the opinion I got from it, although the third party seems more
like a service the guy used. The guy was clearly using Dropbox and its brand
name for his gain, but I can't easily get behind this as good thing when he
had domain name first and legitimately. If he went ahead and made a company of
his own called dropbox he might well have been fine, who knows. Just felt
compelled to comment because the anger directed at the guy seems a bit unfair
- it was Dropboxes choice to start a company up called that when they knew
they someone else owned the domain.

~~~
lutorm
He probably would have been fine if his business was airdropping goods or
something else that can be construed as "dropbox" but in a realm sufficiently
different from file syncing. He certainly couldn't have started a file syncing
company called dropbox, that seems like obvious trademark infringement. Mere
registration of a domain doesn't create a trademark.

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mattmaroon
My offer to break that guy's knees from summer 2007 still stands.

~~~
slig
Why so much rage? The original owner registered the domain first.

note that I don't like squatters either, but who can tell that he wasn't
legitimate when he registered it first?

~~~
dkersten
Not to mention that he registered it in the 90's! How does that possibly count
as squatting?

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bjclark
I thought google just bought dropbox.com?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=857101>

~~~
mbrubeck
The domain owner had set the DNS to point to the Google App Engine servers.
Google was never directly involved.

