Filing a Domain Name Dispute? 227
0backlash0 writes "I work for a not-for-profit that's involved in community media especially radio, television, and increasingly, the internet. We exist by and for the community, which is to say that we're not a large organization. Someone has registered a domain name that we used to own: kdhxfm88.org The name appears to be registered in "bad faith". Because of our size, we can't exactly afford to hire a team of lawyers to take care of this for us. What can we do and how do we do it?"
Bad faith? (Score:2, Interesting)
Companies immediately say anyone who registered anything to do with their name registered it in "bad faith." I think you need to get everything uneder control before you go spouting off allegations.
Re:while you're at it... (Score:1, Interesting)
It's theirs now (Score:4, Interesting)
Back when I worked at Qualcomm, I was going to register eudora.org when it's renewal came and went unnoticed and unpaid. But I was told that I'd likely have to give it back at the drop of an even semi-legal hat (or not even: "Give it up or pack your office" would have worked just as well). I was going to use the domain for all the tech support junk, plugins, etc that didn't make it on eudora.com for whatever reason. It was going to be a community-type site, not for profit or anything. As far from "bad faith" as you can get. I was told that the intent of the site wouldn't matter and that they would almost certainly get it from me.
IANAL, but I think unless you can show that you had a claim or that your business will be hurt or whatever (think Coke registering pepsi.biz) then you probably won't be able to get it back. You could try the nice guy route, though. Ask them if they would sell it to you (throw in a 50% "finder's fee" for them) and offer to host whatever email accounts hey have for a year while they transition (careful of spamming, though). Probably won't work, but it never hurts to be nice anyway. Sadly, I think you're S.O.L.
-B
Community Radio 88-92 MHz (Score:3, Interesting)
88.1 is the first FM broadcast band frequency (even though I have seen radios go as low as 87.5), and 107.9 is the last frequency (I haven't seen a radio that tunes above that).
Here in Las Vegas [lasvegas.com], we have radio stations at both extreme ends of the dial, and they both rule.
Advertising..... (Score:2, Interesting)
I've seen in a while.
Who posted this message, and why do they want to increase the traffic to this site?
Re:This happened to me also (Score:2, Interesting)
The ones I can remember being mentioned off the top of my head are: Moneyopolis.org, rafaelhotels.com, and an educational site owned by an New Zealand (or Austrailian, I forget) governement department (actually a typo site in this case.)
Do a search on google for more info on this guy, and I'll bet you'll find a lot more people who have had this happen to them. And don't let his Armenian address scare you, if you look at his area code, it looks like he may actually be from Idaho.
Cambodia Airlines website also turned into porn (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"used to own" (Score:2, Interesting)
I wrote to them, never received a reply...when it came loose a few months later (I guess nobody wants aka-ed), I snapped it up again.
Things like that happen. In my case, the issue wasn't worth lawyers and $$$ just to find out what had happened, though a lot of mail users at mail.aka-ed.com (5 friends, who now only use me for spam!) were pissed off.
Re:This happened to me also (Score:2, Interesting)
I registered the domain jonnydigital.co.uk over two years ago with FreeNetName, a company who figured they could make money by giving out free domains. The only catch was that you had to dial into their ISP at least once every 90 days or you lose the domain - not a problem, since I was careful to dial in every few months - and they charge £95 (about US $135) to buy back the domain or transfer it to a different domain.
Unfortunately, I slipped up and lost the domain. I didn't mind because by that stage I had moved my site to jonnydigital.com [jonnydigital.com], and the domain was going to expire in two weeks anyway so I was pretty confident that I could buy it back dirt-cheap with another company when it expired.
It would seem that they've renewed my domain and they're now squatting it. It's been registered by Freenetname again [www.nic.uk] under a different name. I know it can't have been registered by another freenetname user because the company has stopped giving out free domains.