School Wins Four-Year Battle Against Porn Site

Feb 13, 2008
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School Wins Four-Year Battle Against Porn Site




Framlingham College [http://www.framlingham.suffolk.sch.uk/college/findus] in Suffolk, England finally has a chance to get the website www.framlinghamcollege.co.uk to refer to itself, rather than the Canadian porn links that have been sitting there for the past four years.

Back in 2005, the college tried to set up its own website, but found that the URL had already been bought up by "Realm Solutions, Inc." in Canada, which was using it to link to "Mature Sex" - not a great brochure for a Christian school.

The College appealed to Nominet [http://www.nominet.org.uk/], the firm set up in 1996 to handle .uk disputes. Nominet determined that Realm Solutions bought the site in January 2005 and so its rights to the domain were totally legit.

In the event of a complaint, the charge is sent to the domain's owner, who has about 15 days to reply. Nominet gets about 700 complaints every year. Ten percent of the cases are resolved almost immediately in the complainant's favor, about a third settle in mediation, and another 25% go to to an independent adjudicator.

Four years and at least one appeal later, Nominet ruled in Framlingham College's favor and Realm Solutions turned over the domain name, free of charge.

"In general, if there is a legitimate complaint from a business or individual, we will hand over the domain name," said Realm Solutions spokesman Rob Montgomery. "Unfortunately, in this case, we dropped the ball and didn't get back in time to allow that to happen."

Source: BBC [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7826794.stm]

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Skrapt

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May 6, 2008
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Umm I don't really understand, Realm solutions bought the domain name fairly but had to give it up for free because a Christian school might not get their schools name as the domain name? Sounds kinda unfair to me, thousands of others would shrug and go for www.collegeofframlingham.co.uk or something, not complain because some dopey parents might think a link to a mature website is the actual schools site.
 

s0ap sudz

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Aug 28, 2008
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I live in Massachusetts in the USA, and we have a town called Framingham nearby. I think the similarity is pretty funny.
 
Feb 13, 2008
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Skrapt said:
Umm I don't really understand, Realm solutions bought the domain name fairly but had to give it up for free because a Christian school might not get their schools name as the domain name?
Nope, they chose to give it up freely. No-one's quite sure whether Nominet or Realm caved first.
 

mokes310

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Oct 13, 2008
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They probably just thought that it wasn't worth the effort of litigation to prove that they owned it first and gave it up. Plus, think about it this way, is it that hard to redirect that porn site to another site?
 

Alex_P

All I really do is threadcrap
Mar 27, 2008
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The_root_of_all_evil said:
Back in 2005, the college tried to set up its own website, ...
They sure are "with it".

Maybe they'll discover wireless router in 2012?

...

mokes310 said:
Plus, think about it this way, is it that hard to redirect that porn site to another site?
Sound like it wasn't really a porn site. More like a linkdump website, used to generate search engine hits. Kinda like those typosquatting pages you see if you go to, say "escapist-magazine.com", but with porn instead of shit like credit reports.

-- Alex
 

cleverlymadeup

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Mar 7, 2008
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this isn't as bad as Don Henley from the Eagles suing some guy for domain squatting donhenley.com, the thing was the guy who owned the site was named Don Henley

the eagles guy won the dispute