Squatters do this shit every day to regular people and small businesses, but they don't have the money to convince a judge to hand over a domain.
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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Hey it's just fair, and the judge has a new sports car suddenly and or a yacht.
I was more talking about the costs of the legal process itself. Justice is expensive, not everyone can afford it.
A squatter is why Valve used steampowered.com instead of steam.com. The owner of steam.com (who has owned the domain since the early 90s!) has consistently refused to sell to anyone, and has never stated a specific reason why.
I see nothing wrong with that. It predates steam and they aren't attempting to extort large sums of money from anyone.
What the judge should have done is threaten to cut the domain name in half and see who was willing to give up their claim out of motherly love.
I wonder how much the city of LA would pay to get La.com back haha.
Why a city would want a .com tld? A .gov tld would be far more applicable IMO
Annoyingly, people are more likely to "blind guess" at .com than .gov, just cause there's more of them
Do people even still exist who have the arcane knowledge to type in a domain directly?
Hey, that's not arcane knowledge.
Arcane knowledge is memorising the server's IP address.
Aichteeteepee, colon slash slash, doubleyoudoubleyoudoubleyou dot...
I do, but only for websites I already know, though usually I have those bookmarked.
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The city of LA should not get a .com name. They might have a case that la.com should not have a .com either (they look like a tourist .org though if they are not acting like a .org they are scammers) - but this would be a very hard sell in court. The city of LA should have a .gov (which won't allow them) or .us (which is not organized well - something they should be mad about and pressure to get fixed) name.
I think the initial goal of top level domains having any real meaning is dead.
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I don’t have all the details to the case, but after reading the article I kinda think they got it wrong.
Let that man call himself Lambo and keep the domain. As long as he isn’t pretending to represent another brand, such as Lamborghini.
They got it right because they sided with the wealthy corporation.
Another great example of this being an economic rent problem.
Namecoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies, but never caught on because it's >99% domain name squatters. There's no mechanism to increase the cost of renewal to anything proportional to the value of the name, so they always renew for practically free. Consequently there's no incentive for web browsers to support it.
A domain name is like a plot of land. Right now our choices are crony capitalist ICANN with eminent domain, anarcho-capitalist crypto DNS, or sailing the high seas on an .onion address.
Hey hey hey, there’s i2p too.
I always love these shitty “replace the enter key on a keyboard” news thumbnails. Like, ah shit, accidentally hit the “Domain Name Registration” button on my keyboard.
Oh, that's no biggie:
Hrmm let's see.. am I petty enough today...
Please avoid GoDaddy.
GoDaddy has been involved in many controversies since its foundation in 1997.
I prefer NameCheap, but almost anyone is better than GoDaddy.
*Edit: broken link
Holy $+(+$ even a registrar can't stay out of trouble
Thanks for the education
I don't get it. Since when are similar words and cultural references and nicknames too owned by the trademark owner?
It was pretty normal for most of the age of trademarks' existence to use such derived references, including commercial use.
"He tried to claim ... a word play on "lamb" and not ... " - why would he have to?
I'm (ok, not really identifying as a fan of anything, but it's good) a Star Wars fan and I can point out plenty of such references there to other authors' creations, and George Lucas notably doesn't hide or deny that, actually the opposite.
They are owned by the trademark when the person owning/using the name is acting like the trademark. Trademark law is generally based around would someone be confused if they say the other one. I could start a house construction business can call it Lamborghini without a problem so long as I was very clear in all advertising that I'm only building houses and not in any way related to the cars - but if I start putting Lamborghini cars in my advertising I could get into trouble for creating confusion even though my competitor Joe's houses has cars in his ads. (this is obviously a made up situation)
From the article "didn’t develop the site, had attacked the company on more than one occasion, and tried to profit from its established reputation."
If he had developed that site in what looked like good faith he would have kept it. However all indications were he didn't care about Lambo as anything other than a get rich quick scheme and that will fail to trademark since the name is only valuable if it is confused with the trademark. A parody site (obvious parody) would have been fine. Obvious star wars fan sites as welll (though this could infringe on other trademarks so care is needed). Even adopting Lambo as his nickname could have worked - but if that was his intent he wouldn't have tried to sell.
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zombo.com still good though
That's a fight I'll take up arms for.
You can do anything...
But where will we find young sheep passing under a bar videos?
Stupid greedy asshole got what he deserved. Could have made bank by selling it for 1 million already. But the greed rulebook said to keep raising it to 75 million.
Fuck Lamborghini too.
He raised the price higher than the cost of going to WIPO to deal with it. If he set the price to $1 or 2 million they likely would have paid it. $75 million is bonkers.
He also set precedence. A few more cases like this can the cost of going to court becomes cheaper for everyone.
Yes, fuck poor people for trying to screw over corporations.
He bought the domain for $10000. Not sure what your definition of poor is, but in my opinion someone poor isn't "investing" in expensive domain names.
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