The registrar was RegisterFly. Some of its users describe problems starting over 1 year ago when two co-owners began feuding. In the middle were owners of domain name registrations who paid for renewals but found their domains expiring because no action was taken after accepting their payment. Their domain name accounts were locked, preventing them from moving to a new registrar.

On Monday, GoDaddy announced it has reached agreement with RegisterFly to take over the customer databases containing domain names that have not expired but were registered with RegisterFly.

Before the transfer, GoDaddy managed approximately 20 million domain names. GoDaddy refuses to give details of the deal with RegisterFly but makes assurances that GoDaddy did not purchase RegisterFly.

Former customers of RegisterFly certainly will be relieved to once again be able to act upon their domain registrations, though there are sure to be legal complications for those who lost domain names due to expirations. More at The Age.com

Because so many top level domain names have already been snapped up, creativity is important unless you are willing to pay large sums for existing top level domain names. If you simply can't find a good domain name through an accredited registrar that's currently available, you might look at the expiring domain name market. Acquiring an expiring domain name is what this article is about.

The Players

The main players in acquiring expiring domain names are currently: Enom's Drop Club; Snap Names and Canadian company Pool

Tread lightly and carefully when choosing a service that specializes in expiring domain names. Some are reputable and some are not.

How to Acquire an Expiring Domain

Domains that expire don't actually get thrown back into the big pot of domains available on expiration date. Rather there is first a "grace period" of 40 days. During this grace period, the domain usually will not result in resolving to a web site and may show up in databases as expired, but the domain name can only be renewed by the current owner of the domain name registration.

Next comes a "redemption period". This redemption period is usually about 30 days long. During the redemption period the current owner of the registration can renew the domain but must also pay a redemption fee of approximately $100.

After the redemption period is over, the domain enters a "deletion period" of five days. At this point the domain name's status is "locked". Between 11am and 2pm Pacific time on the 5th day of the deletion period, the domain name will be deleted from the ICANN database.

The Drop

"The drop" is described as that 3 hour period between 11am and 2pm Pacific time on the 5th day of the deletion period. This is the time when major players in the expiring domain name business go to work with various types of technical systems. And dont kid yourself, this is very serious business as you can learn by reading DNJournal's article Inside a Drop Catchers War Room

An important point to understand is that it is possible for a registrar to simply "repossess" a domain name prior to the drop. If a registrar realizes they have a valuable commodity they may never allow the domain name to go through The Drop phase, or shorten the redemption period. Some registrars have amended their registration agreements to supposedly allow them grab up valuable expiring domain names by calling it a "repossession".

ICANN rules currently specify that domain names go through the three expiration phases (a total of 75 days) and so there's some question as to whether registrars are legally within their registrar agreements with ICANN when they capture expiring domain names without putting the names through the process. However, at this date, ICANN has done nothing to stop the practice.

The Major Players

The major players in acquiring expiring domain names are currently: Enoms Drop Club; Snap Names and Canadian companyPool

Each of the "the players" charge fees (currently Pool and SnapNames charge $60, Enom charges $30)for attempting to snag the expiring domain name. If more than one person signs up to acquire the expiring domain name, each service has its own rules as to how it handles the competition.

Pool won't even tell you if you really have any competition! Instead, if Pool is the first to snag the expiring domain, you are then given 3 days to place a sealed bid for the domain name (not knowing if you are the only bidder or there is competition). Even after winning that round, there is yet another auction round.

SnapNames has an exclusive contract with Network Solutions (who controls expiring domain names that were registered with Network Solutions during the expiration period). Therefore, SnapNames gets first choice on acquiring these expiring domain names through Network Solutions. With SnapNames, you are told if you are the only bidder and therefore only have to pay SnapNames fee (currently $60) for grabbing the domain name. If there are more interested parties, the parties compete in an auction similar to the final phase auction at Pool.com.

Bottom line is that capturing a good expiring domain name can be far less expensive than acquiring an active domain name. However, there is no guarantee that you will be the only person interested in acquiring the domain name or that you will win the eventual auction if there is competition.

Simply put, Ham struck a deal with the country of Cameroon who controls domain registrations for the .CM top domain extension. Users attempting to navigate to any domain which ends in .CM which has not already been registered in this small country results in a redirection to sites controlled by Ham where Yahoo places ads. Ham is paid each time someone arriving at one of these web sites clicks on a displayed ad.

It's estimated that about 20% of domain URLs manually typed contain some type of typo. Some of those typos include a surfer typing .cn instead of the intended .com extension. Multiply the typo by the number of people typing in URLs manually each day and Ham makes a chunk of change.

The .cn extension is not widely used in registered domains because the entire country only has approximately 167,000 computers online.

Cybersquatting (the act of intentionally registering a domain name connected with a well known trademark) has long been an Internet problem. Recent laws have curtailed these actions; however, Ham maintains what he does cannot be viewed as cybersquatting since all domains with the same typo are treated equally - landing the user on a page controlled by Ham filled with ads. Ham also doesn't register the domains and therefore has not purposefully targeted a trademark. And, interestingly enough, the place a user lands appears to be depend in the URL typed.

http://www.microsoft.cm results in one landing on http://agoga.com/, a site controlled by Ham. However, http://www.disney.cm results in landing on a blank page at http://www.searchportal.information.com. http://www.domainnamelawyers.cm also takes the user to Ham's http://agoga.com/ while http://www.cnn.cm redirects again to http://www.searchportal.information.com, but this time the page is not blank.

Some Domainers' blogs believe Ham's techniques are ingenious and wonder why they didn't think of the technique first. Others suggest that what Ham is doing is part of the "extremely dirty domain name business". Scam or smart business?

Much speculation flying about the Internet blogs concerning who that registrar is. Many believe it is Go-Daddy. Go-Daddy appears to be one of the few registrars who would have sufficient staff to handle a massive transfer such as this.

ICANN states the complete transfer should take place by the end of next week, at which time the new Registrar will make the announcement.

In addition, Kevin Medina, owner of Register Fly must appear in Federal Court on May 25, 2007 to show cause why RegisterFly should not again be held in contempt of court and be further sanctioned.

Three letter .com domains are a rarity and often worth the price to large multi-million dollar corporations with long names. BCF.com is must easier for customers to not only remember, but spell correctly.

"... the big money is in the aftermarket, where the most valuable names -- those that draw thousands of pageviews and throw off steady cash from Google's and Yahoo's pay-per-click ads -- are driving prices to dizzying heights."

For years Ham maintained a very low profile. He explains that his tactics for finding and purchasing domain names, deals struck with domain registrars and professional jealousy created anger amongst other domainers and therefore caused Ham's desire to remain a mystery man.

Ham, a Canadian who trained as a doctor, now owns more than 300,000 domain name registrations and is estimated to generate approximately $70,000 million a year in revenue. Soon he was giving away and selling lists of available domain names.

By the time Ham completed his two year residency, he was making more money in a month through Internet ventures than his yearly hospital salary. Just as Ham put aside opening a private practice, the Dotcom bust providing him the opportunity to purchase hundreds of thousands of valuable domain names as companies abandoned them.

In those early days, Yun Ye was Ham's competition. In 2004 Ye sold a domain name portfolio of 100,000 domain names for $164 million. You can read more about Ham at CNN Money

Last week's landmark Supreme Court decision has already spawned a request for a new trial.

Vontage hastily filed for a new trial based on last week's ruling by the US Supreme Court, stating that the $58 million verdict against them for infringing on Verison's patents should be throw out. Vontage's filing claimed that jury instructions were in error, relying too heavily on the test for patent obviousness that the Supreme Court declared too rigid in last week's ruling.

Verison argued that the current appellate process should go forward and claims that Verison did not raise the issue of rigid testing for obviousness during the trial. More

A US appeals court ruled on this motion Wednesday, denying a retrial for Vontage.

The Court clearly opted for a loosening of the current approach for deciding when a combination of existing elements deserves patent protection.

The previous standard required that for an invention to be declared obvious, some "teaching, suggestion or motivation" needed to be in existance to show that a "person of ordinary skill" would have thought to combine certain elements.

Many technology companies felt this standard was too strick and doesn't keep up with the fast pace of technological invention.

Critics are afraid that any changes will throw the world of patents into confusion and disarray.