Different companies do parked pages in different ways. It's not uncommon for a parked domain to have a ToC. At the very least they would have a privacy policy. If you do a search you will see the same ToC on other websites. Most parked domains, even the one you linked to, have a "buy this domain" type link too.

Anyone whose been around the web for a while should recognize these things.

The contact in the ToC is someone associated with fabulous.com. This is the webpage that is attached to their email address. http://darkbluesea.com/ which does seem to justify some things Boyd is saying. And considering there was a contact email, name, address, phone and fax that also seems to contradict Mason's statement that it was difficult and costly to ascertain the owner of the domain.

Continuing to argue these points that are clearly not true is just raising questions. Especially since they're completely immaterial. It doesn't matter how substantial the site was, how much traffic it got or how much revenue it generated. Even the judge's ruling says it doesn't look like his attempts to profit from it were successful. The site probably could have said "Dutch Boyd likes cheese" and 2p2 still would have won the case.

Dutch Boyd infringed on 2p2's trademark. Was taken to court and lost for obvious reasons. Nobody feels sorry for him. End of story.

Few more affiliate links in the code:

misspellings and all, boilerplates don't generally have misspellings.

i can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if it was "difficult to obtain the owner of the domain name," that's pure ignorance. there's no excuse for spending $ on a laywer to do a whois search for a domain name.

If what Boyd claims is true I would agree. We will have to wait to see if anyone has an ownership history record to prove it. The only record I was able to find doesn't cover his original AU registrar. If anyone else can find a domain ownership record on the web for Boyd's tenure with the domain, please post. This is all I could find:
http://www.whoismind.com/whois-histo...poker.com.html

Given that Dutch did not address the issue of the content that I brought up when he replied to me, and I found his affiliate codes in the site coding, which pretty much dismisses his claim that is was a standard parked domain, I am not ready to accept that this is true yet.

Yep, which made it all the more amusing that Mason was so intent on asking Dutch why the "domain was listed for sale." I mean, that's a completely standard thing for parked domains.

And it's put there by the registrar.

I can understand that Mason might not know these things, or might misconstrue them. But the fact that his lawyers were seemingly clueless on this, and thought a templated parked domain page was a "developed site", and they couldn't figure out who owner the domain without "considerable effort" is just mind-numbingly awful. And scary.

Agreed.

Yes, I'm going to tell you that. Google this (with quotes):

"can play online poker games in any of our internet poker rooms, win big money at party poker or the starluck casino"

https://www.google.com/search?client...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

When you put something on quotes for a Google search, you are searching on the *exact* quoted query string. So the results are only exact matches of that rather long and specifically worded sentence.

Do you really think Dutch owns all of those sites? This standard wording was used in a ridiculous number of parked pages, all across the web, back in the fun old days of affiliates/referrals and online poker.

It's probably a bad idea to have the "domain for sale" type language on the page. I forget the exact details but lets say you create a website and choose a domain name and some time later find out the name has been trademarked. You've already invested time and money in the website so maybe you tell them "hey I put a a lot of time and money in this site and didn't know it was trademarked. Would you consider buying the domain for $X so I can recoup some of my costs?" Boom. Extortion. Lawyers jump all over that. The way the law is written these types of cases are easy money for the attorneys.

Moki,
I get that he used a template for his site but it was modified. The affiliate codes are the smoking gun here. One of the referral codes references source=pokersiteonline.com The ownership of that domain is hidden, just like the probability that twoplustwopoker ownership was hidden.
http://www.whoismind.com/whois/pokersiteonline.com.html

Have you ever used Mail Merge to create form letters in MS Word. Same concept. You build a template and then you plug in different website name and it generates as many sites as you want.

Agreed... and lawsuits have changed what's typically done these days:

http://www.law360.com/articles/46408...rked-web-pages

But back in the day, it was extremely common for this to be done.

Dutch was clearly trying to game the system by mass-registering hundreds of known poker-related websites in an automated fashion by appending the word "poker" to the domain name. And ironically, probably infringed on hundreds of other company's intellectual property as well.

He was hoping that he'd make money from it... and it bit him in the ass. I don't feel bad for Dutch, especially given his background in law. He should have known better.

But the misunderstanding of exactly what transpired is pretty ridiculous.

No. That's not an affiliate code, the referring site passed along via the query portion of the URI.

It may seem like a semantic difference, but it's important. The template automatically grabs the URL of the parked domain, and stuffs it into the URI so that the sites the traffic goes to can track where it came from.

It's analogous to doing a blind search and replace.

Microroller,
AFFILIATE codes are the smoking gun. Those are the codes that assign credit to the referrer for either a CPA (one time payment for a referrer) or rev share. There is no way these codes were assigned to anyone but Dutch.

Moki,
You are wrong here. What was the url of the site that the code came from? It was twoplustwopoker.com which is different from the referer code, pokersiteonline.com. I am betting that Dutch owns/owned both an pokersiteonline.com was one of his pokerstars affiliate codes.

They aren't affiliate codes. Affiliate codes with regard to online poker sites are another thing entirely.

If I took my domain MyPinkElephantButtPoker.com and parked it with that registrar back in the day using their poker template (there were parked templates for thousand of categories of pages back then), the resulting page would list:

Automagically. I don't actually do anything myself other than register that domain name with that registrar (and potentially, indicate what category of parked domain template to use).

You can also indicate a specific domain name that you want the clicks to be referred from (what you're calling an "affiliate code") when you register the parked domain, and use the template, to consolidate where the click traffic to the various linked poker sites is coming from.

No one is arguing that Dutch wasn't trying to do what you're saying he was trying to do. He clearly was trying to register hundreds of domains, and make it appear that the click-throughs they generated were coming from a site he owned.

Obviously he owned that site. That's exactly what he was trying to do, register hundreds of sites to generate traffic that could be attributed to him.

What I'm saying he didn't do himself was:

-- Offer the domain up for sale. This was in the template from the registrar
-- Build out a "significant" website; it was just a template that thousands of people used
-- Specifically target TwoPlusTwo; he mass registered a crapload of domains with "Poker" appended to the end of them

I also think it's pretty likely he didn't make any money with this grand scheme, either. He probably lost a whole lot, given the cost of registering and parking the domains.

Moki,
There was a very large affiliate site out there called pokersourceonline.com. Dutch registers pokersiteonline.com and hides the registration. Coincidence?

As I told you I have been a computer programmer focused on web technologies for a very long time. I'm also very familiar with affiliate marketing. You are wrong. You seem to be convinced you're not but I assure you you are.

Template of the affiliate code would look something like advertiser****d?affiliatecode=[insert domain name] and that template can be used for millions of domains if necessary. It's very trivial.

That part after the ? mark is part of the query string. If someone were to click on that link advertiseer****d on the other end looks if there is a query parameter of "affiliatecode" and then marks that user as coming from that domain name. Each domain would need to have some sort of relationship with advertiser****d but since Fabulous.com seemed to have a bunch of poker related parked pages they possibly worked something out to make it easy to add new domains. The affiliate codes may not be directly connected to Boyd but most likely through Fabulous.com before it gets to him. That would be the simplest way to do it at least.

If I'm' not explaining this clearly please let me know what specifically you don't understand and I can try to explain it further.

ubAffilID=8411 is not a domain name - affiliate code registered to someone to receive a payment. No way it is not Dutch.

Nobody is saying it does or doesn't go to him. It's just that it's trivial to automate the whole thing which is usually a service these parked page providers offer. It's not as big a deal as you seem to think it is.

I had some domain names parked before I developed sites for them. There were tons of ads that were relevant to the topic of the domain name. I didn't do a single thing to set up the content or the ads. I didn't set up any individual relationships with any of the advertisers. That was all taken care of by the company that I parked the domains with and I had very little control over the content of the site or what ads were placed on it.

Having read his book, I do feel sorry somewhat for Dutch due to his illness.

Some of you are missing the main point. At the time of registration, Dutch Boyd was looking to capitalize on someone else's intellectual property. His intention was to profit and infringe on the trademark of Two Plus Two. The only possible defense would be that he didn't know that he was infringing when he registered the name. Of course, no reasonable person could conclude that. There is no other way to look at it.

Now, it can be argued that in the domain game, many people tread a fine line between infringement and legitimate good faith registration. But this name clearly was registered in bad faith. Yes, there are many decent people who play in the domain realm who do the same thing every day. It is a profitable endeavor to do so, for many who do it. However, it turns unprofitable if someone you infringe on decides to take a stand and put you to the test. If all you ever were at risk for was to just turn over the name, then everybody would have an incentive to just take shots and register blatant trademarks.

It actually is a fair system. Most of the time you will not have to pay a steep price. But a very small percentage of the time you will get caught with your hand in the cookie jar, and the person catching you will be looking to teach you a lesson so that others do not try the same move.

TwoPlusTwoPoker.com is as blatant a registration as you can get. There is no defense. Now, this doesn't make Dutch Boyd a bad person, though most trademark holders would likely call him unethical for this. The fact is that almost every business that is involved in intellectual property is faced with this sort of issue regularly. It is also true, that many businesses also engage in treading the line to what they can also get away with. I'm sure Two Plus Two has to walk the line when they take advertising from companies that turn out to be scammers, or have engaged in previous illegal behavior. After all, everyone's hero, Poker Stars, was essentially a criminal enterprise. They made the decision to knowingly break laws because they believed that they would make enough money so that the penalty, if they ever had to pay it, would be acceptable.

That is the world of business. Poker Stars had the same bad intentions to break laws, but it worked out for them. Dutch Boyd rolled the dice and came up on the unlucky side. Companies like Exxon bribe officials in foreign countries all of the time, and even admit to it and pay fines. It is the cost of doing business for them. Microsoft and Apple get sued every week for infringing on other people's intellectual property. Sometimes they are guilty and sometimes not.

If you just look at the facts, Dutch Boyd is clearly in the wrong. But he also clearly had some bad luck. His actions are not really so horrific in the scheme of things, especially in the domain registration business, but he was made an example of, and that's just the way life is sometimes.

Showing more to this pattern - also in the site code is another knock-off url,
http://www-fulltilt-poker.com. This domain ownership is also hidden. It seems that Dutch knew exactly what he was doing with the knock-off domains when he hid ownership of these and not the generic names. Masking ownership costs a few extra dollars. Why spend it unless you have to, like when you are infringing upon trademarks.

Awesome post.

Russ got caught. As a poker player he most certainly understood the risk of what he was doing. When he got caught, instead of doing everything Mason asked and settling on some reasonable amount of money, he made a bad decision to call Mason's bluff. I suspect the "go f yourself" approach to companies that he had squatted in the past worked quite well.

Mason felt he had to take the action he did. I've never run a multimillion dollar business so I'm not in a position to comment on his course of action.

The "Mason sucks at poker" and "Mason's poker books are terrible" stuff is a window into how he deals with adversity. All, of course, is completely irrelevant and petty.

Serious question...

If he would have registered toplustopoker, 2plus2poker, two+twopoker, or something along those lines using the term 2+2 but not writing twoplustwo would it have been different?

The plus sign cant be used in a URL. I think dash is the only punctuation allowed. Just a guess but your first example would probably not been found. No idea if they can enforce trademark on the second.