domainwatch.org

ccTLD ICANN Meetings in Wellington, New Zealand, 25-31 March 2006
http://www.wwtld.org/meetings/cctld/20060326.Wellington-agenda.html

” …

wwTLD meeting Wellington Sunday 26th March
…

ccTLDs best practices: latest and future developments
…

15:15 Session 5: Nominet Legal Case: Score 1 for the Registry
Presentation of The Ches & Brad Case, Emily Taylor, .uk and Jackie O’Brien, Allens Arthur Robinson.

… “

Emily Taylor’s presentation is available here (700k PDF).

from: http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/playtime-at-portsea-may-get-rough/2006/01/22/1137864806219.html

” …

Scammers go offline
By Helen Westerman and Rebecca Urban
January 23, 2006

IF CYBERLAND is the new frontier, then Chesley Rafferty and Brad Norrish are definitely its cowboys.

The pair have gained a reputation as profligate cyber-scammers for sending out misleading invoices to businesses asking them to register their domain names.

And it seems their activities continue. Norrish has been ordered to hand over a site he has been using that shares the domain name of online travel booking service Webjet.

The travel group’s website, webjet.com.au, generated $77.5million from 2004 to 2005 and was rated Australia’s No.1 travel site in the same year by Hitwise.

But Norrish’s domain name, webjet.com, which he bought in October, takes users to Webjet’s competitors and some porn sites for good measure. Webjet complained to the international arbiter, the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), that by using the same name, Norrish was confusing users and using the website in bad faith.

The elusive Norrish did not respond to the panel, which also found he had provided a false phone number to register the domain name.

Panellist Ross Wilson ordered Norrish to transfer the website over to Webjet.

The action follows a $1.3 million fine imposed last month by the Australian Federal Court on Norrish and Rafferty, for an elaborate copyright scam involving 2.2 million websites registered in Britain.

In 2003 the pair illegally “scraped” the database of Nominet UK, the national registry for .uk domain names, for the details of 50,000 registrants.

Judge Robert French found the pair and three of their companies — Diverse Internet Pty Ltd, Internet Payments Pty Ltd and Seychelles-based UK Internet Registry Ltd — had broken copyright and Australian free trade laws.

Judge French said the pair’s conduct had been “flagrant”, and also ordered them to pay costs, estimated at $1 million.

But getting the money will not be easy. Rafferty was declared bankrupt in Australia in October and the company solicitor at Nominet, Edward Phillips, told Full Disclosure that several of the defendants were in the process of being bankrupted by Nominet and others.

“They have some assets, but we cannot accurately predict how much, if any, of this money we will see — some of it is frozen in foreign bank accounts,” says Phillips. But Phillips says if the action is enough to bankrupt them, that may be good enough.

… “

from: http://arbiter.wipo.int/domains/decisions/html/2005/d2005-1096.html

” …

WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center

ADMINISTRATIVE PANEL DECISION

Webjet Marketing Pty Ltd v. Brad Norrish

Case No. D2005-1096

1. The Parties

The Complainant is Webjet Marketing Pty Ltd of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, represented by Minter Ellison of Australia.

The Respondent is Brad Norrish of East Perth, Western Australia, Australia.

2. The Domain Name and Registrar

The disputed domain name is registered with eNom, Inc.

…

7. Decision

For all the foregoing reasons, in accordance with paragraphs 4(i) of the Policy and 15 of the Rules, the Panel orders that the domain name be transferred to the Complainant.

Ross Wilson
Sole Panelist

Date: December 29, 2005

… “

from whois.enom.com

” …

Checking server [whois.enom.com]
Results:

Registration Service Provided By: eNom, Inc.
Contact: info2@eNom.com

Domain name: webjet.com

Registrant Contact:
NA
Brad Norrish (NA)
NA
Fax:
2/47 Forrest Ave
East Perth, Western Australia 6004
East Perth, WE 6004
US

Administrative Contact:
NA
Brad Norrish (bradnorrish@yahoo.com.au)
888 317 8842
Fax:
2/47 Forrest Ave
East Perth, Western Australia 6004
East Perth, WE 6004
US

Technical Contact:
NA
Brad Norrish (bradnorrish@yahoo.com.au)
888 317 8842
Fax:
2/47 Forrest Ave
East Perth, Western Australia 6004
East Perth, WE 6004
US

Status: Locked

Name Servers:
dns1.name-services.com
dns2.name-services.com
dns3.name-services.com
dns4.name-services.com
dns5.name-services.com

Creation date: 02 Oct 1995 00:00:00
Expiration date: 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00
Whois-Services: 8d4c43df-6a82-4026-bc06-4bfafddd0eda@whois-services.com

… “

from: http://www.vnunet.com/2148077

” …

Nominet wins data mining case
Fraudsters ’scraped’ WHOIS database to send misleading domain name notices

Ken Young, vnunet.com 05 Jan 2006

Nominet UK, the national registry for all .uk domain names, has been awarded more than AUS$1.3m in damages following a data mining scam that led to thousands of Nominet registrants receiving misleading domain name notices.

Legal firm Pinsent Masons said that the case goes back to January 2003 when Nominet discovered that its WHOIS database, which lists domain names and their owners, had been illegally mined.

Details of registrants were “scraped” from the database and 50,000 registrants received misleading notices from an unknown “UK internet registry”.

The unsolicited notices resembled invoices and tried to sell .com names to the holders of .uk names.

Nominet warned its registrants to disregard the notices, and began an investigation which led to Chesley Rafferty and Bradley Norrish and three of their companies (Diverse Internet Pty Ltd, Internet Payments Pty Ltd and Seychelles-based UK Internet Registry Ltd).

In September 2004 Rafferty and Norrish, together with their three companies, were found liable for copyright infringement and breaches of Australian fair trade laws by copying data from Nominet’s WHOIS service, and issuing misleading domain name registration notices.

Nominet has been awarded damages for copyright infringement of AUS$810,953, with additional damages of AUS$500,000 to reflect the “flagrancy” of the breaches.

The latter award is one of the highest additional damages awards ever made by the Australian courts, according to Nominet. The defendants are also liable for the costs of the proceedings.

“We take the protection of our intellectual property and copyright ownership very seriously, both as the core of our business and in protecting our .uk registrants from domain name scams,” said Nominet chief executive Lesley Cowley.

“This judgment not only recognises the value of Nominet’s domain name register, but underlines the responsibility of legal systems worldwide in tackling internet scams.

“By fighting, and winning, this case we are very clearly showing that scamming is a serious industry issue which will not be tolerated.”

Struan Robertson, editor of Pinsent Masons’ Out-law website, explained that the case was a civil action rather than a criminal proceeding.

“The WHOIS database is in the public domain, but you are not entitled to scrape it and use it in this way. They may also have been ‘passing off’ by pretending to be a Nominet representative,” he said.

“It was copyright infringement on a large scale but, because it is a civil action, there is no threat of a custodial sentence in such a case.”

… “

from: http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39155298,00.htm

” …

Domain scammers hit for $2.3m for UK sting
‘Renew now or lose your website’ fraud costs them dearly…

By Will Sturgeon

Published: Tuesday 03 January 2006

Two scam artists who duped victims with bogus demands for domain name registration have been hit for AU$2.3m (£980,000) by an Australian court.

Brad Norrish and Chesley Rafferty copied personal information from the Whois listings of Nominet, the dot-uk domain registrar. They then contacted around 50,000 domain owners and told them they must pay a fee or risk losing their domain.

The pair were found guilty of “flagrant” disregard for Nominet’s copyright and ordered to pay AU$1.3m in damages to the registrar, after it was forced to close down its Whois database. They were also hit with AU$1m in costs.

Lesley Cowley, CEO of Nominet, said the company takes “protection of our intellectual property and copyright ownership very seriously”.

Cowley said in a statement the need to protect its customers is also paramount and praised the international co-operation which had secured the conviction.

She said: “By fighting, and winning, this case we are very clearly showing that scamming is a serious industry issue which will not be tolerated.”

… “

from: http://www.domainesinfo.fr/article.php?art_id=813 (French)

Translated into English by Google: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.domainesinfo.fr%2Farticle.php%3Fart_id%3D813&langpair=fr%7Cen&hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

” …

Amend € 1,4 million for two defrauders
4 Jan 2006

An Australian court has just sent a very clear signal to the swindlers: to give false opinion of expiry or recording of domain names is a serious, detrimental act and severely punished.

To have usurped the law from the copyright, two defrauders have just bailed out of a fine of 2,3 million Australian dollars, that is to say a little more than 1,4 million euros.

An exemplary judgment for a couple of swindler emblematic. Because Brad Norrish and Chesley Rafferty made much speak about them since two years and half. The two “contractors” had succeeded in plundering the base of data WHOIS of the English register Nominet, thus obtaining the co-ordinates of owners of domain names.

They had used this information to make false opinion and to send them within the framework of mailings of mass to the owners of names. The opinions, seemingly very official, tried to convince the “victim” to pay at the full price is the renewal of a name which it did not even have, that is to say the recording of a name “potentially interesting” for this victim and currently available.

Serious consequences

Approximately 50 000 owners of names would have been concerned with this operation, launched while using companies like Domain Names Australia (DNA) based in Melbourne in Australia.

The consequences of this business had been very serious since Nominet, which carried felt sorry for against the two men in 2003, was obliged temporarily to close its base WHOIS to protect it.

In addition, in Australia, several governmental organizations gathered to prevent this kind of swindle. An interesting initiative at the time when, in France, one has noted for a few months a recrudescence of attempts at frauds. Thus several known companies would have been contacted by so-called registry offices indicating to them that they had just received a request for recording on names attacking the laws the company. The latter then saw herself encouraging to record the names “in a preventive way” by the company in question.

Source:
The Australian

… “