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Recovering Stolen Web Domains Can Prove Challenging

By Carolyn Elefant

Marc Ostrofsky is the victim of a crime: His property was stolen, and authorities know where it is. But 30 months later, Ostrofsky still hasn't been able to recover it. That's because the property was a domain name, and as the Houston Chronicle describes, the laws governing recovery of stolen names have not evolved quickly enough to keep pace with technology. Ostrofsky has done well for himself in the domain name game, having sold "Business.com" for $7.5 million. In 2005, he paid $160,000 for the domain name P2P.com which he and his partners hoped to use for a site dedicated to facilitating peer-to-peer sharing. In 2006, someone stole the name and resold it on eBay for $111,000 to Mark Madsen, a basketball player for the Los Angeles Clippers, who didn't know that the name was stolen. A suspect has since been arrested and accused of hacking into an online account of one of the name owners. So why can't Ostrofsky get the name back now? One complication is that domain names aren't physical property, but a right to contract, where owners pay for the right to use the name. Thus, claiming that a domain name is stolen is a novel...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on August 05, 2009 (boomark / email).