That's right.
RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org have been owned by grassroots supporters of Ron Paul since 2008. The sites were first registered in 1999 and 2000. At one point, Paul owned RonPaul.org, but let the registration expire, and for some odd reason did not attempt to get RonPaul.com or RonPaul.org in preparation for his 2008 presidential campaign.
Last month, Paul expressed regret in an interview with libertarian conspiracist Alex Jones that he didn't own RonPaul.com. Following that, the owners of RonPaul.com offered to give the former congressman RonPaul.org for free, and detailed reasons why they wished to keep RonPaul.com (details here). If he still wanted to get the .com site, they said that they would sell it to him for $250,000 and include their email list of 170,000 addresses (which he could tap for fundraising, and easily recoup the expense).
Instead of taking their offers, Ron Paul decided to go to the United Nations (of all places) and ask them to strip the domains - without compensation - from the current owners, and give them to him.
This situation prompted the Paul fans who own RonPaul.com to say this:
Paul's hypocrisy in going to the UN is just too ironic. Click here to read the entire story from Paul's grassroots supporters.
The owners of RonPaul.com are violating ICANN rules regarding domains, specifically the part about "by using the domain name, you have intentionally attempted to attract, for commercial gain, Internet users to your web site or other on-line location, by creating a likelihood of confusion with the complainant's mark as to the source, sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of your web site or location or of a product or service on your web site or location." This is something that every person who registers a domain name agrees to legally.
ReplyDeleteTo dispute a domain registration, a request for dispute resolution must be filed with ICANN. At that point, it goes to an Administrative Panel from one of the four organizations approved to handle ICANN dispute arbitration. Because this is an international affair (domain is registered in Australia), it goes through an arm of the UN. This is part of ICANN's rules, and not a choice of forum.
Furthermore, unless RonPaul.com has collected those 170,000 email addresses independently of its Zazzle store through something that explicitly notified the user that they were signing up for a mailing list subscription, they have no legally obtained mailing list to sell.
Please edit or take note - in my previous comment I was looking in the wrong terminal - the domain is registered in Panama.
ReplyDelete