Thursday, February 28, 2013

Illegal Cyber Squatting by GoDaddy.com

I have been working on bringing all my sites back up the last week. Mostly this means getting my game servers up which have been offline for some time since I host these servers at my own home. I came across another problem though... I would like to describe it to you to help you not make the same mistake in the future and to ask you to please not support a website called godaddy.com.

My website, Xanthians Online, was registered to a certain domain name for the last 5-10 years. The domain name was extremely obscure and only made sense to those who were interested in a niche set of fantasy books about 'Xanth' written by Piers Anthony. You probably have not heard of these books. I ran a fansite since I was in 5th grade for fans of the series to come together and discuss the books. It was a great site, my very first website ever.

Last year, I missed the emails warning me to renew my domain for this website, and I lost the domain. Immediately after losing the domain, a company called GoDaddy bought the domain, even though they do not have any explicit reason to. This is referred to as cyber squatting and is it illegal. They buy the website that was accidentally put up for sale and then try to sell it back to the original owners for as much as they think they can get. They price it so that paying them is less expensive than suing them, because what they are doing is illegal.

Out of principle, I started filing a complaint with the organization that handles these cases before they go to court; the WIPO. After filling out strange complicated legal documents (incorrectly filling them out, I am sure) for about an hour, I tried to submit my complaint to the WIPO. It said that it failed due to me failing the 'human verification' at the bottom. The verification was extremely simple and I absolutely typed it in correctly, so there must be something wrong with the WIPO website. Sadly, I could not reload the page without losing an hours work filling in boxes here and there and typing my story. You can see the ridiculous, broken WIPO website here:

http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/filing/udrp/eudrpcomplaint.jsp

I will not try to file the complaint because I know it will lead nowhere. Reading about it online, these organizations are in the pocket of large corporate entities like godaddy.com and the only real way to settle this without giving godaddy money is through the US court system which could cost thousands of dollars. I will be moving my website to xanthonline.net. Please do not support godaddy.com in any way.

Lss