The domain name BowlingBalls.com has sold for $225,000 in a recent sale in the US.
The buyer who knows his stuff about bowling balls was Nick
Melnikoff who has bowled in PBA tours and owns Bowlers Paradise, a web site that sells bowling balls and accessories.
Just goes to show that domain names can still fetch big bucks so it may just be worth hanging onto that co.uk registration.
You may have noticed today that some popular websites, such as Wikipedia have ‘gone dark’ in a protest against Internet censorship and in particular the support against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA, Protect IP Act.
‘Dark’ Wednesday is intended to raise public interest in the Acts, showing people outside the industry how their everyday ‘browsing’ lives could be affected.
SOPA, the House version, and PIPA, the Senate’s version, are very similar in their intentions, both aiming to stop illegal spreading of copyrighted material by ‘rouge’ websites that are run outside of the United States and therefore not subject to US Law enforcement.
The resulting action, should these Laws be passed could theoretically mean that an entire website is shut down because it contains a link to a suspect site.
Obvious supporters of the Law include media producers, movie bodies and music producers who are in favor of taking action against such sites distributing illegal copied material . Whilst critics of the movement include web giants such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, eBay and Twitter.
What critics argue is that the Laws will adversely affect innocent websites, stifle freedom of speech by blocking legitimate websites, and could harm the Internet’s underlying infrastructure by restricting access to websites accused of infringement using a technique called DNS blocking, which makes it impossible to visit a website by typing in its domain name.
SOPA is now on hold in USA Congress, but no one believes the advocates will give up on their goals. Whilst PIPA is scheduled to go before the full Senate for a procedural vote to begin debate on the bill on January 24th.
SOPA the Stop Online Piracy Act is making the headlines across tech websites at the moment causing wide spread controversy in the online world.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011, by Representative Lamar Smith and a bipartisan group of 12 initial co-sponsors.
The proposed SOPA legislation gives the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against websites associated with infringing, pirating or counterfeiting intellectual property. Critics of the bill say that it is the foundation for a ‘great American firewall’ that will curb creativity, cost jobs and curb free speech.
One domain name registrar that initially supported the SOPA legislation was Go Daddy after appearing on an official congressional list of companies that publicly supported the proposed legislation.
Following this, just last week a Go Daddy boycott day was organized by users on the community news site Reddit even tho Go Daddy renounced its support for the SOPA bill.
GoDaddy’s CEO, Warren Adelman, has issued a statement admitting to as much, saying that “We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to Go Daddy’s prior support for SOPA, which was reversed.”
The domain name waynerooney.co.uk was registered back on April 2002 by a Mr Huw Marshall after he saw the young player play for Everton FC’s youth team. “I thought he was a striking new talent and… had the idea of setting up a non-commercial fan site,” Mr Marshall said.
However, the fan site was never launched and subsequently Wayne Rooney moved to Manchester United.
Fast forward four years and the company created by Rooney himself to manage his name and image rights, decided they wanted the email address.
Lawyers then contacted Nominet, the organisation responsible for the management of .uk domain names, who in turn contacted Mr Marshall. The transfer of ownership was refused.
Following the refusal Nominet passed the matter to the body’s dispute resolution service, who after consideration ruled that because Mr Marshall had not shown any intention of using the domain after several years of ownership, he should transfer it back to Rooney himself.
Google have recently told the NY times that they are planning to experiment within the hotel finder sector launching a brand new website for the service.
It seems however that the search Giant are yet to secure the domain name ‘hotelfinder.com’ which is currently owned by an individual.
Whether or not Google could be thinking about making an offer for the domain name is anyones guess, but it goes to show the value of domain names.
If you have a good idea and your domain is available, don’t hang around. You never know that your perfect domain could be moments away from being snapped up by someone else.