Intellectual Property Law

Air France Crash Raises Questions About Domain Name Registration

By Kim Zetter

As investigators seek to unravel the fate of Air France flight 447, there’s been speculation online about an unusual domain name registration made some two years prior to this week’s plane crash, flight447.com.

The mystery of the Air France flight that disappeared this week deepened after news agencies on Wednesday confirmed a previous Air France flight from Buenos Aires to Paris was the target of a bomb threat just days before. That plane was inspected and arrived without incident.

Now it has emerged that someone registered a domain for the missing plane’s flight number on September 30, 2007. The domain name, which currently points to a search engine, expires on the same date this year and was registered to Success Incorporated in Malibu, California.

It’s not unusual for individuals to register domain names shortly after news breaks on a big story and then to sell them. Indeed, a second domain AirFrance447.com was registered the day of the crash, hours after the news made headlines, and a third domain AirFranceLawSuit.com is being auctioned on e-Bay this week after being registered the day after the crash.

The timing of the two-year-old flight447.com, however, makes it unusual.

But when contacted, the owner of the latter domain, Kari Bian, said that the connection between his registration and the crash is coincidental. “It’s just an accident (that there’s a connection),” he said. “I have nothing to do with anything. I feel really bad for that flight.”

The cause of the crash is still unknown.

Bian is an Iranian film producer based in the U.S. who recently finished an Israeli-Palestinian love story called David and Fatima about an Israeli soldier’s relationship with a Palestinian Muslim girl. He’s also listed as executive producer for Secrets of Life, a movie starring Tony Curtis, Vivica Fox, Jon Lovitz and Cheech Marin, and a semi-autobiographical tale called The Iron Man, which is unrelated to the Robert Downey, Jr., film and is loosely based on Bian’s life.

Bian also owns a small side business registering domains called Thriftys. Bian says he buys domain names and owns about 500 of them, which include the names of numerous airline flight numbers as well as the names of cars, flowers, businesses and songs. He says he created the flight number domains with a program.

“I just put ‘flight’ in front of 1 through 1,000 and I register them,” he explained.

He says he didn’t buy the flight domains for any particular reason and has no intention of selling flight447.com now.

“I’m very busy with my work and my career,” he says. “I’m not waiting for a flight to crash so I can go sell it. I’m a professional businessman and I make movies and it happens that I own this domain name.”

Another domain related to the Air France flight — AirFranceLawSuit.com — that is up for sale on e-Bay was registered the day after the crash to Hoda Elkassem in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Elkassem, who is in Kuwait temporarily where her husband is teaching art, responded to an e-mail inquiry from Threat Level. She’s a pharmacist and the author of two children’s books, Ruqayyah Makes Her Wudhu’ According to the Sunnah of the Prophet and Abdur-Rahman Makes His Wudhu’: According to the Sunnah of the Prophet as well as an e-book on buying a home without paying interest.

She said she took a break from her pharmaceutical work four and a half years ago to be at home with her children and decided to buy and sell domains “since it is easy and does not require leaving my children.” She’s given some away for good causes and sold others for as little as 99 cents and as much as $1000. She often purchases expired domains or ones with catchy titles.

She bought the Air France domain because she flies frequently over the Atlantic often and couldn’t stop thinking about the families of the crash victims.

“To not know the fate of your loved ones in my opinion is the worst torture,” she wrote.

Generally she doesn’t see much action on her e-Bay listings until the end of the auction, and there are currently no bids on the Air France auction, but she says this one has received a lot more hits than usual and has a number of watchers — people who sign in to e-Bay to watch the progress of a specific auction.

In the e-Bay auction listing she writes:

It is my hope, God Willing, that a group of qualified Attorneys will want to set up this website in order open communication between the 228 families involved and to ensure they get what they deserve for having to go through such unnecessary grief.

Airplanes are built with state of the art technology allowing air traffic controllers to know the whereabouts of all airplanes at all times. Communication should not have been lost and the family members of the victims should have known the fate of their loved ones immediately.

Full post as published by Threat Level on June 03, 2009 (boomark / email).