Myspace.com lose Myspace.co.uk domain name
Q. If you happen to be in the fortunate position of registering the .uk domain extension of the name of the biggest social networking site in the world a full 2 years before they launch, what is the stupidest thing you can do?
A. Try to make money from it by putting up a “parking” page full of PPC ads.
As the moment you do this you can be accused of “kiting” and you will be asked to hand the domain name over.
Which is exactly what happened in February of this year. The owners of Myspace.co.uk, a UK ISP called Total Web Solutions were told to hand the domain over to Myspace.com as they recenty put up a Sedo parking page up when Myspace.com gained popularity, thus cashing in on type-ins.
Amazingly however this decision has just been overturned and Myspace.com have been told to hand back Myspace.co.uk to Total Web Solutions. However the domain is pretty much worthless now as the moment that TWS attempt to put up another landing page then I imagine the Myspace.com lawyers will descend like a ton of bricks. Why oh why they didn’t just sell it to Myspace.com a few years ago is beyond me.
Full story here courtesy of TechCrunch UK.
What I’m listening to right now: Day 26 ft Fat Joe – “Got Me Going” (Remix)
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 12:52 am and is filed under General Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
April 30th, 2008 at 11:05 am
This is a very skewed view in MySpace’s favour.
What happened was the company bought the domain 6 years before MySpace started, and being an ISP used it to provide email services to their clients. The page was parked on Sedo before MySpace rose in popularity, and nothing was done to the parking page by the ISP. It was Sedo who started displaying MySpace ads on the page at a later date.
They didn’t sell the domain because their clients used, and still are using it for their email.
Why is it amazing that the decision was overturned? What right have MySpace got to the domain, seeing as it was registered before MySpace even existed. If I buy a domain now, and use it for email, I don’t expect to have to hand it over to someone else years down the line just because they decide they want to use it.
It’s standard practice to when creating a site that you check what other domains are taken. If MySpace object to the .co.uk then they shouldn’t have used the .com in the first place, and chosen another name that was free.
I don’t see why you think it’s right that a big company gets to do whatever it likes.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Gareth, I don’t think it’s right that a large company does “whatever it likes”. My understanding was that TWS parked the domain on Sedo to cash in on Myspace’s popularity and if that was the case then they deserved to have the domain taken off them as its a clear case of cybersquatting.
However if the domain was accidently parked on Sedo without TWS’s consent then that’s a different story and Myspace.com shouldn’t have any right to it.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Would they be able to do an auto redirect, again to cash in on the mis-types or would this not be allowed too?
April 30th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
At the time that they bought the domain name they had a legitimate right to it. Whatever they do subsequently shouldn’t affect their right to own the domain name in the first place. If MySpace.com want to kick up a fuss they should do so with a court action for trademark infringement not the quasi-legal process of a Nominet complaint. The domain name was registered in good faith - that should be where Nominet’s interest ends.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
From the reports that i`ve read, the website TWS had on the site was made redundant, although the domain was left running as it was used for customers email addresses.
As a result, they parked it on Sedo on or before July 2004, before MySpace took off. At first it was just displaying general ad’s, but as MySpace became more popular the Sedo ad server started displaying MySpace related ad’s.
So when it was parked on Sedo there was no intention to capitalise on MySpace, as it didn’t exist like it does today. They had no say on what ad’s were displayed, as obviously it all happens automatically, and it was the Sedo server that started displayign MySpace ads.
The MySpace lawyers accused TWS of capitalising on the domain when Fox bought MySpace in 2005, but it was parked on Sedo before this, and there was no evidence this was the case, only hearsay.
This was the reason why the judgement was in favour of TWS.
I still think that the problem happened because of the founders of myspace. They should of chosen a name which had all extensions free, and then bought them all. Would of stopped this from happening.
Whatever happened, I don’t think TWS were in the wrong as they had the domain first.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
[...] Myspace.com lose Myspace.co.uk domain name, what would you do if you had Myspace.co.uk 2 years before Myspace was [...]
May 15th, 2008 at 9:57 am
I see absolutely nothing wrong with what TWS did. If you look around the net there are millions of domains with similar wording etc. I think this is the big boys beating down the small guys again. The net is definitely not an equal playing field - money wins everytime.