Sam Morgan shames domain squatter on Twitter
Sam Morgan of Trade Me fame has publicly embarrassed a domain name squatter who registered the venture capitalists' name and now wants payment.
Mr Morgan announced the following on Twitter; “Jason from officenow.co.nz has domain names sammorgan.com and wants to sell them to me quietly. What a nice man.”
Private Bin thinks this is a bit rough; poor Jason is just trying to earn a crust. We’re not all millionaires Sam.
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Comments and questions9
Its not tough at all. Squatters are just parasites of the information age. Good move Sam.
I was pissed because somebody owns all the vacant land around my house as well!
Why should this Sam Morgan have any right to the domain then another Sam Morgan?
Sam just made himself look like an ass imo because Jason beat him to it.
Jamie - he is not complaining that another Sam Morgan has it. He is complaining that a Jason Patel (? source: zenbu) has it.
Also, your house analogy is closer to typosquatting than cybersquatting.
What Jason has done is disliked by most of the internet and he will have to deal with that. He may well find that the ill will his actions generate cost him more in his business than the profit he could have made if Sam paid up. He may even find that The New Zealand Domain Commission or a court *gives* the name to Sam.
...I have a good friend named Sam Morgan -- I'm sure he'll be very interested in buying this domain name. Thanks for the heads-up!
Would really like to see how the .nz process would allow a .com name to transferred. I assume you mean the UDRP process which applies to .com names.
A quick whois shows the domain was first registered on 7/3/2006.
I presume Sam new all about the Internet before that date and if he wanted the name he would have registered it.
No story here, move along.
What many of you fools ignore is the fact that to squat means to sit on the domain and do NOTHING with it. If this Jason character had his own website with that name, then fine. All he is doing is finding high profile companies and registering names before they do, and extort millions from these companies. The fact that HE approached Sam Morgan is even worse. ITS ILLEGAL.
Hey, I just found your name on the internet and I registered it for the army. All I did was think of it first, right??
Those of you defending this leech are morons. Learn the law.
So if I uesd my to start a sports store or munufacture firearms, would I have the right to do so??? After all it is MY NAME.
This is apparently a genuine example of "cyber-squatting", where someone registers a name they have no real connection to just so they can sell it to someone who has already established the name in business or whatever. But a lot of what is called cyber-squatting turns out to be big business bullying small users who had been innocently using personal or club names etc. etc. You'd be surprised what is registered as trademarks, and in any case few ordinary people want to risk the cost of a lawsuit against a major corporation - hence these are usually settled privately. This is sometimes called "reverse domain-name hijacking" and there is some evidence that it is in fact more common than the true "cyber-squatting" cases like this one.
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