Nominet wins important legal victory in Data Mining Case (Bradley Norrish + Chesley Rafferty)
Nominet wins important legal victory in Data Mining Case
http://www.nominetnews.org.uk/jul04/data-mining-victory.php
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Nominet has succeeded in obtaining injunctions against three Australian companies and one individual for their parts in a data mining attack on the Nominet register and for issuing misleading registration documents.
The court will pass judgement on the activities of a fifth defendant, Bradley Norrish, and will take orders for damages and costs at a later date.
Nominet obtained the injunctions from the Federal Court of Australia against Chesley Rafferty, Diverse Internet Pty Ltd, Internet Payments Pty Ltd and (UK) Internet Registry Ltd. The cases were settled after the parties admitted copyright theft by extracting millions of records from Nominet’s WHOIS Internet domain name database.
“We’re delighted by progress so far on this case and have a very positive outlook for the overall result,” said Lesley Cowley, Managing Director at Nominet. “Naturally, we want to protect the information that we hold as a domain registry and to be successful in proving copyright ownership is a significant success for us. Similarly, the welfare and security of .uk registrants is paramount and by fighting, and winning, against these fraudsters we are saying very clearly that scamming is an issue we take seriously and want to see brought to justice.”
In late 2002, employees of Diverse Internet Ltd and Internet Payments Ltd attempted to copy Nominet’s register of domain names by abusing the company’s WHOIS service (a database of information on domain name users). Nominet detected these attacks and was forced to take the unprecedented step of suspending the WHOIS service for the only time in its six-year history.
The aim of the attack was to capture address details of .uk domain name registrants and resulted in many hundreds of registrants receiving fraudulent invoices from a company called UK Internet Registry.
Diverse Internet Ltd and Internet Payments Ltd were under the control of Mr Norrish and Mr Rafferty, and employees of these companies.
Legal proceedings commence this week against Bradley Norrish and UK Internet Registry for copyright infringement and breach of Australian fair trade laws by issuing misleading invoices. During the hearings, Nominet presented papers and computer hard disk drives seized by the Federal Court, which contain evidence that domain registrants’ information was illegally obtained.
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