Ashton's Vice Chairman was contacted today by a London company trying to sell registrations for ashtonunited.co.uk and ashtonunited.com
They were very pushy with respect to time-scales and wanted £500 for 10 years reg. for both addresses.
I, Nigel, have a registration cert. from Nominet for the co.uk address and have held it for 3 years and still own it till June 2004. I only pay £10 per 2 year period.
Is this some sort of con? Has anyone else had any other approaches?
Sounds like a case of cybersquatting. A company registers a lot of domain names for free then tries to sell or rent them to other companies of whose names correspond to the domain names that they have registered. My understanding is that its a con. Just get a varient such as ashton-united.co.uk registered for free instead.
As the current domain holder, you have first choice over renewing your registration. You will be contacted by nominet when your registration period is near expiry. Only when you decline to renew will the name become available to other potential owners.
Under no circumstance should these criminals be paid a penny, as you are the rightful owner of the domain.
Nothing illegal about selling domain names.. been doing it for years:)
You can have any you want.. If the domain is an obvious company or football team then there are things to watch out for.
You can't pass yourself off as them..In fact running the domain name you ahve to make sure its clear you are not them.. Like I have at the top of my accy stanley site
You can't make money out of the name.. So you cant use asda.com to get people to buy things for example... However you are making money selling the domain arn't you.. thats making money out of it.. So you give up the domain and ask for x amount compensation.. thats the way to do it if its a recognised company name..
You can get a domain off someone but a dispute (esp global tlds like .com) can take 2 years+ to sort out.
It's just that I remember reading something about a English fan of the X Files had set up a fans site. Then along come Fox (the makers arent they) and demand the site from him. And they wanted to charge him for them taking it off him, even though he said he give it them. I think it was in the MAnchester Evening News
AS David and Goliath battles go, they don't come much more uneven than billion-dollar US entertainment giant Fox versus - Dennis Lee from Wythenshawe.
But the 24-year-old call centre worker is reeling after a letter from the Beverly Hills media moguls dropped through the letter box of his parents' Baguley home threatening him with a $300,000 bill.
Rupert Murdoch's company is insisting that Dennis signs over three web site domain names by tomorrow, claiming he is infringing their copyright on hit sci-fi series The X-Files.
The movie buff registered three websites to post reviews of forthcoming DVDs of the X-Files series.
These are xfilesseason8dvd.com, x-filesseason8dvd.com and xfilesseason7dvd.com.
Previously, Fox had used the format to provide information on the DVD boxed sets of earlier series'.
Now the huge corporation's lawyers say that under the US "anti-cybersquatting" Consumer Protection Act, they have the power to win back Dennis's domain names in court.
And they are also threatening Dennis with a bill for damages of up to $100,000 for each of the three sites. Dennis, who earns £14,000 a year working on a help desk for catalogue company Great Universal Stores, admits to being a bit bemused by the whole business.
£5 registration
"It cost me £5 each to register those, so you'd think they'd offer me that at least," he said.
"I'd like to fight it really, because it's quite a bullying six-page letter insisting that I fill in a form enclosed which would sign everything over to them.
"I'm not sure what to do. I can't afford to talk to an intellectual property lawyer, but I certainly can't afford $300,000 unless they let me pay at 50p a week.
"All I had on the sites was a small logo and a bit of text saying that reviews of the DVDs were to be posted there, but I've closed them down now."
Fox claims that in registering the domain names, Dennis was either acting in bad faith and trying to pass himself off as an official site to make money, or trying to hold them to ransom.
But Dennis, who owns more than 300 DVDs, says that he is simply a very keen movie fan. "I just really like films and I'm very keen on the X-Files, so I thought I could post some reviews if they released new DVDs," he said.
No-one from Fox was available for comment about the case.
Lawyer Michael Sandys, of Manchester solicitors Cobbetts, said although Dennis had an arguable case, it was a question of what he was prepared to risk.
"It comes down to pragmatics and even though it looks like Dennis has done what he has in good faith, he could lose and be presented with a bill for costs of thousands," he said. "It could be expensive.
"To win a case, Dennis would have to show that he didn't set up the sites to make any monetary gain or to do Fox down in any other way.
"My advice would probably be to write to them and offer them the domain names, but ask for the £5 each that they cost to register in return.
"If they didn't like that, he could make that offer before court without prejudice and then they would probably have to accept his terms."
Current Topic - Club approached over website registration
