Bodog now Newbodog
- 30th Aug 2007
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- General
Bodog has been forced to move domains to newbodog.com after enom pulled the DNS. this is so fucked up some guy in the US pushed a patent for online bets, which he then took to court, now Bodog are not a US company so they didn’t attend the court appointment, the Judge awards the guy the case by default…. which then he uses judgement to land grab all bodogs domains.. sick or what
added was was just chatting to a friend online and he said
If you can use a judgment to force enom to turn off domains, you could do the same thing to ICANN, which means you could sue anyone in the world and get their site turned off.
now that is scary!
DaveN
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Are you kidding me? Bodog? That’s really scary!!! Maybe I should consider selling all my .com domains and moving to something more exotic…
What a jerk-off, there’s no way they can enforce that shit. this causes major damage to their business and enom should have at least tried to fight it.
All those good serps gone, bummer .
I hate to say it, but we are already there.
Literally today, I agreed to forfeit a domain to a competitor as part of a lawsuit settlement. They teamed up with their sleezey (my opinion) lawyer and sued me for a number of things under false pretenses. One was claiming they had the ‘rights’ to this domain.
It was no coincidence the site beat them in the SERPs.
My attorney fees quickly got out of control. I don’t even want to say how much I have spent. In the end it was just more cost effective to let it go.
Now I am left with trying to salvage what I can. If anyone has some good suggestions let me know.
Crazy!!
Playtech and other game operators pay 1st technology licensing fees already. Bodogs royalty paymnets would of been about $11 million, the $48 million was the default awarded to 1st technology for future licensing.
Since bodog didnt pay, another judge awarded 1st tech the domains :) ouch!
Odd, they got awarded domains they cant legally use since they are trademarked. Just a punishment!
Scary if you own a dot com in an industry that US government is out fuckover. Can you appeal in your own country and get it overturned? Suddenly having the UN manage domains does not sound so stupid :)
That sucks for them, they always looked like one of the slicker poker sites.
I call this patent squatting. Shit companies/bags going out getting very broad patents on up and coming things…then they sit and wait for some other company to actually develop/create something that kind of falls close to the patent and then they sue.
The patent system is broke and these tactics have been used for a very long time. I haven’t read any patents for a long time but I know there are “ideas” or “stuff” that have patents on them that are not even invented yet - like crap you would see in a star wars movie.
While I agree that this sucks, it certainly is not the nightmare scenario we would all expect.
First, this is only enforceable because bodog is incorporated in a country that participates in several international patent/IP treaties which make them subject to jurisdiction in American courts (this is a good thing in some cases - we had a client in Pakistan and UK sue a client in American courts which was incorporated in both the US and back in Pakistan. It streamlined the process of a legitimate suit against a company which stole and resold their products online.)
Second, bodog deserved to have their domain taken if they refused to show for an IP case. Summary judgments are served all the time, and I am sure bodog has lawyers on retainer who could have attended. Many times courts use Whois information to attempt to contact the owner, but I doubt they had to rely on that to get in touch with a company like bodog.
So is http://www.nowbodog.com/ owned by the original owners of bodog? I don’t get why they changed.
Here are some articles that might help you understand..
http://www.4flush.com/gamblingnews/?s=bodog
In short, some guy patented ‘online gambling’ years ago, sued bodog, they didn’t show up for court.. he won.. I’m sure bodog thought the whole thing humorous.. it’s not like they owned anything the US could sieze.. except perhaps a few domain names :O
[…] unlikely horror story it has in fact happened to online gaming company Bodog. I saw this story on Daven’s blog - it caught my eye because I used to play a fair bit of online poker and bodog had seemed like one […]
They might want to think about throwing a title attribute/tag on http://www.nowbodog.com/ at least.
He took advantage of the fact that they are not a U.S. Company. C’mon now… “patenting” online gambling? Sue, sue, sue, it’s the American way.
First Technologies didn’t patent online gambling. Read the patent (5,564,001), it has no relationship what-so-ever with online gambling.
What they did patent, is “Method And System For Interactively Transmitting Multimedia Information Over A Network Which Requires Reduced Bandwidth”.
What the are claiming, is this patent covers the transmission of images over the Internet. So this blog is violating this patent. EVERYONE is violating this patent. THE WHOLE INTERNET is violating this patent.
They simply picked online gambling companies as “straw men” defendants, because they’ll just write a check rather than go to court and make Scott Lewis prove his ridiculous and absurd claims.
Acacia claimed to have a patent that covered all audio and video streaming over the Internet. But they started out suing only Internet porn companies — again because they won’t show up in court. Then they extorted licensing fees from Universities, and finally sued the cable companies.
The patents have no merits, and do not cover the applications and processes they claim they do. It doesn’t matter.
You’ll be sued next. You want to fly to the U.S. and spend months in court, or pay Scott Lewis a few thousand dollars in extortion money? It’s mafia-style extortion using the U.S. civil justice system as the thugs. Pure evil. Scott Lewis should rot in prison for this.
Does anyone know the latest with the domain names?
I know that newbodog.com became a mirror of bodoglife.com, but I’ll bet bodog is still aching for bodog.com again…