Righthaven copyright troll loses domain

Righthaven is the copyright trolling outfit created by the Las Vegas Review Journal to blackmail alleged newspaper copyright infringers with baseless threats of domain seizure and huge cash judgements. When they created righthaven.com as a home for information related to their indiscriminate bulk-litigation campaign, they neglected to supply the registration information required of them, and it appears that they declined to provide the info when requested to do so by their registrar, GoDaddy. So GoDaddy's taken away their domain:

Now it appears that GoDaddy, the domain registrar for the domain Righthaven.com, has taken down their domain for an invalid whois. According to ICANN rules domain owners are required to maintain valid whois information. Anyone can report an invalid whois record via the WDPRS system, which then passes on the complaint to the sponsoring registrar of the domain. The registrar would then attempt to contact the domain owner and ask them to verify/update their contact information. Should they not do so, the domain can be suspended or even deleted.

RightHaven.com Taken Down for Invalid Whois (Thanks, Clifton!)

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billstewart

Unfortunately, ICANN works for the Trademark Police, and the rules about whois records needing to contain your True Name and ICBM address are there because they think delivering trademark violation subpoenas is more important than protecting privacy, and they’ve extended that to helping the Copyright Police as well.

Yes, Righthaven are trolls, and it’s fun to see karma catch up with such a deserving target, but that’s not what whois was originally for. Furthermore, if you know you’re scum and are willing to spend $100 or so to protect your scummy business, you can get yourself a cheap Delaware corporation, and register the name with the whois record pointing to your official corporate address in a lawyer’s drawer in northern Delaware (as I found out when tracing one annoying spammer.) So the policies are violating the privacy of regular people, while not protecting the trademark holders from commercial thieves.
- pauldavis
  
  you don’t even need to do that. sign up for hosting with the web host i use, and they will happily keep your ID private by listing themselves as proxy registrants for WHOIS records. check the WHOIS info for jackaudio.org, for example.
Anonymous

@Rider They didnt do what they were supposed to. How is GoDaddy enforcing their rules “any” reason. You make it sound like they just picked a site at random.
Gunn

Yay! Thanks for the info, Cory.
Anonymous

I love the idea that this is tagged “petard.”
Will/Nobilis

This is the best news so far to come out of the Righthaven fiasco. I laughed so much when I read this, I woke my neighbors.
Jake0748

yay :)
Anonymous

Awesome. Although now I’m sure Righthaven will sue GoDaddy.
Anonymous

Judging by one blogger’s attempt to contact them (http://ix23.com/righthaven-shakedown/blog/), it’s not like they were using it anyway.
badtux

Sadly, they have *not* lost the domain. All that has happened is that GoDaddy has suspended it until RightHaven pays a $10 “reinstatement fee” and provides correct WhoIs info. When that’ll happen, who knows — but it will likely happen early next week.
- Anonymous
  
  Its a shame we can’t take up a collection and buy it before they can.
Rider

I don’t like GoDaddy playing internet nanny and taking down anyones domain for any reason.