Now, when you go to righthaven.com, you are greeted with the image above. Any guesses as to what this is about?

Interestingly, Google appeared in court, and spoke out against Righthaven on Friday, Vegas Inc. reports. It says:

Righthaven, in asking the 9th Circuit to overturn Mahan, argued that in the 9th Circuit, there’s “almost a per se pronouncement against a finding of fair uses in cases of 100 percent unauthorized replication.”

“That simply is not the law, nor should it be. Indeed, adoption of any such per se rule would wreak havoc on businesses like Google, whose ability to offer innovative and useful services to the public depends on the adaptability of the fair use doctrine,” Google’s filing said.

I’m not sure how long this is going to go on, but clearly Righthaven is not going down with a fight, as it continues to appeal cases it lost in the name of fair use, and on grounds that it’s business model itself is suspect, or in other words, has a “lack of standing”.

With the TAS, applicants will have to answer 50 questions, as detailed in the Applicant Guidebook. ICANN posted some important info for applicants today, regarding updates to the guidebook and financial assistance for qualifying applicants:

An updated version of the Applicant Guidebook was posted with the opening of the application window. The updated version incorporates clarifications made through responses previously published by the gTLD customer service center. Main points of clarification are on topics such as batching, background screening, the applicant support program, Continued Operations Instrument, GAC advice processes, and the registry code of conduct. Additional information and answers to previously asked questions can be found in the Program’s Supplemental Notes. These materials are not intended to introduce new requirements or criteria. Links to both the Applicant Guidebook and the Supplemental Notes can be found at the ICANN New gTLD page.

Also available now are changes to the Applicant Support Program: limited financial assistance is offered to qualifying applicants. Through this program, applicants, especially from developing economies, have access to financial assistance in the form of an evaluation fee reduction and other in-kind or community pro bono services. The financial assistance element of the program will allow a limited number of qualifying applicants to pay a US $47,000 evaluation fee instead of the full USD $185,000. This fee reduction has been made possible because ICANN’s Board of Directors has dedicated USD $2,000,000 to the program. This is a seed fund to which other organizations can donate. In response to public comment, the draft program has been updated to increase availability of refunds, make the program available to certain trademark owners, and broaden the scope for those seeking to serve the public interest.

The necessary links can be found at ICANN’s New gTLD page.

The last day to register with the TAS is March 29. April 12 will be the final day ICANN will accept applications.

In a post on his blog, he says:

In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains. But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.

There are product catalogs, store information, event calendars, regulatory filings, inventory data, historical reference material, contact information—lots of things that can be very usefully computed from. But even if these things are somewhere on an organization’s website, there’s no standard way to find them, let alone standard structured formats for them.

He goes on to express the idea of creating the “data web” to “parallel” the ordinary web, bug geared toward computational use.

Essentially, there would be a data-driven .data alongside a site’s .com.

Wolfram says they’re seeking input and partners for the effort. He appears to be taking a leadership role for the initiative.

Would do you think of this concept?

It ended up going for $3,300. That’s unfortunate for Righthaven, seeing as how they’ve been ordered to pay about $60,000 more in court.

For Righthaven, commonly referred to as a “copyright troll,” having to auction off its domain was rather ironic, as the “company” sought the domains of other sites in its quest for copyright infringement “justice”. As courts tended to rule on the side of fair use in these cases, things got financially worse and worse for Righthaven, which brings us to why it has let its domain go for just over three grand.

While it’s not an incredibly high amount, especially considering the amount Righthaven owes, how much value does this domain really hold anyway?

Is the buyer (which is unknown) looking to capitalize on that awesome brand power of the Righthaven name?

(hat tip to DomainNameWire)

If you’re not familiar with the story, the irony here is that RightHaven itself has sought the domains of other sites, which it deemed in violation of its copyrights. For more backstory on RightHaven, see our previous coverage here.

After losing in court a number of times (losing out to fair use), Righthaven has been unable to pay its own fines and legal fees, delaying payment to avoid bankruptcy. Earlier this month, a judge ruled for Righthaven’s copyrights to be auctioned off. On Monday, the domain name went up for auction.

At the time of this writing, there are six bidders, and the auction goes on until January 6. There was reportedly an initial minimum bid price of $100. It’s currently at $1,300.

Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson (along with his wife) is due in court on January 6, the same day as the auction is scheduled to end.

Not for one ex-GoDaddy customer, who detailed his exchange with one of their customer service representatives on Google+. Chris Heald’s post not only documents why he left, SOPA support, but he also details the surprising level of defeat GoDaddy’s customer service staff must be feeling as they try and woo back previous customers.

The first thing that stood out to me, besides the legitimate reason Heald has for moving his 60-plus domains to one of GoDaddy’s competitors. Heald believes GoDaddy essentially blew the criticism off. That is, until the mass exodus began:

The rep was quite sincere in his apology to me, asked if there was anything they could do to win me back. He had a “We support IP protections, and now realize that support of SOPA is too broad” song-and-dance routine that probably came in from a PR memo today. I told him “no thanks”, and that was that. I’m impressed by the customer service hustle, but it shows that this little incident really spooked them.

I think that the backlash against their support was a lot more swift and severe than they’d anticipated. Their initially glib “lol, whatever” response was replaced by “oh god, please stop punching us in the quarterly financial report!” real fast.

Considering the amount of turnover GoDaddy experienced, the backtracking shouldn’t be surprising, even with the existence of GoDaddy CEO tweets like the following:

To many ex-GoDaddy customers, this is a “too little, too late” reaction from a company that seems more concerned about winning their customers back than they do about taking a stand against SOPA. As for Heald, he sees GoDaddy’s backtracking as a win for consumers:

GoDaddy capitulating is a huge win, because it’s the first stone to come out of the wall. Now that GoDaddy has demonstrated that they were taking too much damage to continue with their support of SOPA, it empowers people to exert similar pressure on other companies, and it demonstrates to those companies that there are enough angry people out there that you need to listen up and pay attention.

Heald also points out the ones at GoDaddy who will truly suffer for the SOPA backlash will be the customer service reps who have to call ex-customers in an effort to win them back:

I feel really bad for the customer service reps that have to do damage control on this. You know that they’re going to be pulling overtime this Christmas weekend because their bosses screwed up.

Who knows? Maybe GoDaddy pays double time during Holiday hours…

News of GoDaddy’s support of SOPA hit its crescendo over the Christmas weekend, spurred on by Jimmy Wales’ announcement of his intentions to move Wikipedia’s domain away from GoDaddy’s service:

From there, the exodus from GoDaddy began in earnest. All told, the registrar service lost over 70,000 domains, and that’s when the backtracking and double talk began. Of course, when large portions of the Internet population are speaking out against your service on sites like Reddit, and there’s a “Boycott GoDaddy” site getting attention, it’s hard not to respond, unless recent GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons enjoys watching his flock flee.

And flee they did. In fact, one of GoDaddy’s competitors, Namecheap, wrote a blog post discussing how GoDaddy was not facilitating the transfer process by returning “incomplete WHOIS information,” an accusation the domain registrar denied in a statement to CNet, which, in part, says:

Because some registrars (and other data gathering, analyzing and reporting entities) have legitimate need for heavy port 43 access, we routinely grant requests for expanded access per an SOP we’ve had in place for many years. Should we make contact with Namecheap, and learn they need similar access, we would treat that request similarly.

However, GoDaddy’s handling of transferring domains was not the issue at hand. Instead, the company’s support of SOPA/PIPA was the driving force behind the defections. So much so, in fact, GoDaddy issued a press release saying they no longer supported SOPA — conveniently leaving out PIPA — as they tried to reverse the course many of their ex-customers were taking.

The release is complete with a “please don’t go” feel:

“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”

Considering GoDaddy was potentially exempt from SOPA’s punitive actions, it’s clear GoDaddy’s SOPA reversal is motivated by business, or the loss thereof.

Was your domain registered through GoDaddy’s service? Does their previous (wink, wink) support of SOPA/PIPA inspire you to leave GoDaddy? Let us know what you think.

It appears that this all didn’t put too much of a hurting on GoDaddy. The company announced that it has surpassed the 50 million domain names milestone (The 50 millionth domain name is DBAkit.com, registered by Kranthi Kumar Kukkala of India.)

The company shared some other stats with us in an email:

• Go Daddy registers more than 1 domain name every second of every day.
• Right around the “dot-COM Bubble Burst,” there were only 17MM domain names registered worldwide.
• While there are more than 2 billion people online, there are only 210MM domain names registered worldwide.
• Go Daddy has more than 9.6MM active customers.

“Sometimes you hear people say all the good domain names are gone, but they are dead wrong,” Parsons said. “An almost unlimited supply of great names is available … right now. In fact, Go Daddy is registering two-and-a-half times more domains a month now, than we were five years ago. Why? Domain names are like 21stcentury real estate. They allow you to own your own place on the Internet.”

“For all the marketing we do … it’s the word-of-mouth, a customer’s personal endorsement … that works as Go Daddy’s most effective advertisement,” he said.

In case you missed it, word of PETA’s porn site came about when the .xxx domain restriction was lifted and companies began their race to register their .xxx site. You know, for brand awareness and all that? Anyway, while it’s doubtful we’ll ever see a Coca-Cola-based pornography site, we will apparently be getting one from an organization that’s committed to protecting animals.

I’m not sure what this means for the content of PETA’s soon-to-be porn site, but if they go the furries route, it would almost be too good to be true. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case, according to some quotes that appeared in the The Telegraph recently. Rest assured, however. Furries or no, PETA is going to deliver its message with a helping hand from the most ubiquitous of Internet mediums, porn:

“We’re hoping to reach a whole new audience of people, some of whom will be shocked by graphic images that maybe they didn’t anticipate seeing when they went to the PETA triple-X site,” said Lindsay Rajt, PETA’s associate director of campaigns.

Does this mean the furries phenomenon is still in play for PETA? Perhaps, but when it launches in December, PETA’s use of their .xxx domain is just as much about generating buzz as it is to titillate viewers:

“We try to use every outlet that we can to speak up for animals,” Rajt said. “We anticipated that this new triple-X domain name would be a hot topic and we immediately decided to use it and take advantage of it to try to promote the animal rights message.”

As for what the site’s content will entail, there’s a description of that, as well:

Visitors to the X-rated site will initially be presented with pornographic content as well as images from PETA’s salacious ads and campaigns, Rajt said. Those images will be followed by pictures and video shot undercover of the mistreatment of animals. The site will also include links to vegetarian and vegan – using no animal products – starter kits as well as recipes.

An example of these advertisements PETA refers to leads this article, and if PETA can promise more alluring shots of Charlotte Ross, who knows? Maybe the message will be successfully broadcast across the web. The question is, is porn an effective medium for getting a message out concerning the ethical treatment of animals?

Would, say, someone who hunts for recreation change their behavior after enjoying Internet porn, wrapped in a bow of “we must protect the animals” messages?

But the most coveted domain name, the one that many will stumble upon while searching for The Tea Party, is teaparty.com. And no Tea Party group owns that domain.

The owners of that domain are a Canadian rock band called The Tea Party.

The Tea Party (band) is a trio out of Windsor, Ontario that have released eight albums through record label EMI. They formed in 1990 and played all the way up until 2005, scoring a number #1 song on the Canadian charts with “Heaven Coming Down.” They have sold over 1.6 million records worldwide. They reformed this year, only to find that the “Tea Party” name had spawned a whole new meaning during the years of their hiatus.

It’s obvious that the band has been at one end of a lot of confusion since The Tea Party (politics) burst onto the scene. As you can see from the lead image above, the landing page to their site, teaparty.com, says “No politics…Just Rock and Roll.”

The Tea Party (Official)No politics….Just Rock & Roll 6 hours ago · 118 likes · 22 comments

The band told Bloomberg Businessweek that the confusion has not been good, even though it draws a ton of people to their site. “So much damage has been done to our name by the political movement that we’re considering selling,” says the bassist, Stuart Chatwood.

They say that last year, they began to get offers from political groups and investors – all wanting to purchase their domain name. The domain, teaparty.com, not only ranks on the front page of Google searches for “tea party” but is the default address that most people would type into the URL bar if they were looking for tea party information.

Analysts say that with the political climate as it is and the name recognition of The Tea Party (politics), the teaparty.com domain could easily go for well over $1 million.

That’s a pretty big payday for a domain registered in 1993. The largest amount of money ever paid for a domain was $13 million paid for sex.com.

The band admits that their politics swing left, saying –

We’ve considered lending the name to Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart to have them dispel some of the stuff that the Tea Party says. As Canadians we’re somewhat sensitive to all the criticism of socialized medicine.

But they add, “We’ve got families.”

As November 2012 approaches, there is no telling what some organized interest might be willing to pay to snatch up such a valuable domain.

Here’s their #1 Canadian hit, “Heaven Coming Down.” According to Wikipedia, they were dubbed “Moroccan Roll” due to their middle eastern influences.