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Disputed .BIZ Registrations
Posted by Ernest Miller on Thursday, May 16 @ 13:02:27 EDT
Contributed by BenEdelman
Governance
BenEdelman writes "

In "Disputed Registrations in .BIZ: A Case Study of Domain Registrations by Swarthmore Associates and John Kirkland," I document 66 domain registrations that list as their sole contact of record [in the Neulevel "Whois" database] Mr. John C. Kirkland, a California lawyer at Greenberg Traurig LLP. At least one of these .BIZ registrations has already been challenged successfully, while at least seven more currently face challenges; domains include AMEX.BIZ, ATT.BIZ, CDW.BIZ, CNN.BIZ, GAP.BIZ, MGM.BIZ, and NCR.BIZ.

These domains are registered to what Infospace reports to be Kirkland's home address and phone number, but WHOIS contact information reflects the use of his law firm's email account. In testing of May 16, none of the sites has a working web site, although some have "under construction" pages.

My work on this subject is available at Disputed Registrations in .BIZ: A Case Study of Domain Registrations by Swarthmore Associates and John Kirkland.

Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School

Note:

On May 16, 2002 in this space we published an item submitted by Ben Edelman entitled "Allegedly-infringing .BIZ registrations by California Lawyer John C. Kirkland". Today (May 23, 2002), LawMeme has been made aware that several of the statements in that article were false or potentially misleading, so I (Ernest Miller) have replaced it with the above corrected version (also submitted by Mr. Edelman).

In the original article, which summarized a longer piece hosted at the Berkman Center, Mr. Edelman suggested that 66 domain name registrations "by Mr. Kirkland" were possibly infringing. In fact, however, the registrations were not "by Mr. Kirkland" personally, but registered to Swarthmore Associates, LLC (and Mr. Edelman's Berkman Center article now reflects this). Mr. Kirkland was listed as the technical, billing and administrative contact. Mr. Kirkland asserts that these domains were all registered for clients of his firm, that the same contact information was inadvertently listed by the registrar for all of the registrations, and that the firm is attempting to transfer them to their clients as quickly as the balky registration system will allow (which isn't as quick as it should be). Mr. Kirkland has provided e-mails to ICANNWatch substantiating this as regards some of the domains (according to ICANNWatch), and I have no reason to doubt it as regards the rest.

For detailed information on this controversy, I highly recommend this article at ICANNWatch (Something Else Used to Be Here)."

 
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Related Links
· Whois
· Disputed Registrations in .BIZ: A Case Study of Domain Registrations by Swarthmore Associates and John Kirkland
· Ben Edelman
· Berkman Center
· ICANNWatch
· Something Else Used to Be Here
· More about Governance
· News by Ernest Miller


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Intentional & Widespread Whois Errors

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