Domain Seizures - Sealed Court Filing

[crabfoot]

Webmaster World has a front page thread on this, but it is hard to learn what it is all about.

After some searching, I found something informative -
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...idea-why.shtml

Looks like this approach might be a danger to any unused domain ...

[KenW3]

Craig Sir, This problem is part of an asset seizure case. All domains were (initially at the start of the case) -supposedly- owned by a single individual and were part of a case filed November 26, 2013. The case is Chan Luu Inc. v. Online Growth, LLC et al

There is a useful discussion at DomainSherpa.com titled Domain Seizures and the discussion provides insight into what has happened. The Internet Commerce Association appears to be looking into this in a post titled Undue Process

From my perspective as a domainer, this may be a situation where the court's trustee for these assets did not comprehend the attributes of property ostensibly a part of this case. As a result, it looks like some of the names held were not renewed properly, expired and eventually dropped prior to the case going to trial. This lack of comprehension (by the courts) for the intangible asset type also suggests some of the domain names may even have been sold or transferred prior to filing of this case. It seems proper research into ownership was not done.

From the explanation I heard for -some- of the assets in question, domainers drop caught some of the defendant's names as they expired (as occurs with any valuable domain name). This is conjecture from reading prior posts, but seems logical. In any event, the names appear to be a part of a single case where assets were seized. The court issued a seizure order for assets (they believed were) held by a defendant, but some of the property in question was not (or no longer) owned by the defendant.

This seizure order should not have been honored by registrars until historical asset ownership and current ownership had been ascertained by the court.