Cybersquatter who owns lukeravenstahl .com Web site causes buzz

[companyone]

Cybersquatter who owns lukeravenstahl.com Web site causes buzz

That's not the Mayor Luke we know

Saturday, May 19, 2007
By Bill Toland, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Eric W. Parkinson has the Pittsburgh blogosphere abuzz, not to mention parts of City Hall.

Who is he? Just your average West Coast cybersquatter (someone who buys and then resells Web site names), the guy who owns lukeravenstahl.com and has had much fun with it of late.

Last week, Pittsburgh bloggers discovered that the Web site named after Mayor Luke Ravenstahl directed visitors to a pornography site. Once the Web site was outed, by the likes of The Burgh Blog and The People's Republic of Pittsburgh blog, it began diverting visitors to the Post-Gazette's Web site, then a William Shatner celebrity roast, then to a music video, then to a YouTube video of Gilbert Gottfried, possibly the most annoying American comedian of the 20th century.

Cybersquatters, who prefer to be called domain speculators, buy up Web site names they think might be bankable someday in hopes of selling the name down the road to people or businesses. Domain names, through various companies, can be purchased for as little as a few dollars.

Often it's fruitless. Sometimes, it's a bit repulsive -- shortly after the killings at Virginia Tech, a man from Phoenix registered the domain names CampusKillings .com, VirginiaTechMurders .com and SlaughterInVirginia com. And sometimes, cyber-squatting can be a lucrative business. This week, the domain porn .com sold for $9.5 million to a Detroit company. That's quite a return, considering the domain was bought for $47,000 in 1997.

Mr. Parkinson hasn't done anything so grievous as the Virginia Tech squatter, though on one occasion his quick reflexes got him in a spot of trouble -- when he snatched up toddwitteles .com (named after a semi-famous poker player) the day after he won a major poker tournament, Mr. Witteles fought back. He did so through the National Arbitration Forum, a mediation group.

But the poker player lost, and an arbiter ruled that Mr. Parkinson was allowed to keep the Web domain because Mr. Witteles had no standing, according to guidelines laid out by the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. "Occasionally, someone will feel 'entitled' to a name I own," Mr.Parkinson said. "If they feel they have rights greater than my own, then they can spend the time and money and file an official dispute and take their chances."

Mr. Parkinson, formerly of Washington, Pa., says he's a "businessman and gambler" who moved to California in 2001 and eventually started a talent agency in Los Angeles. His cyber-speculating, however, is now his primary source of income.

Right now, he's sitting on a bank of about 1,500 names, and at one point he had up to 4,000. He's been doing it for two years.

He says he sells about $100,000 in domain names each year. One of his biggest sales, he says, was a Reggie Bush-related domain name, which he bought for $1,200 last summer and sold for $13,000, just weeks later. (The former University of Southern California running back and Heisman Trophy winner plays for the New Orleans Saints.) He also bought for $20, then sold for $2,500, TerribleTowel .com after the Steelers won Super Bowl XL.

That's why it's called speculating -- he bought the domain right after the Steelers lost to the Indianapolis Colts in 2005. But by February 2006, TerribleTowel.com had increased in value 125 times.

Domain squatting has been going on for a decade. Most squatters buy up names that they hope can later be redeemed for cash, and others park on intentional domain misspellings, knowing that they'll get some traffic. (Various misspelled versions of post-gazette.com are occupied by squatters, for example.)

It's an oddly competitive business -- by the time Mr. Parkinson thought to register the domain name MarkFelt.com, after the now infamous Watergate "Deep Throat" figure, somebody had already bought it.

That was his first taste of domain squatting, in spring 2005, and he was hooked. "I ended up buying about $600 worth of Watergate-related domain names," he said. "Over 90 percent of these names were useless, [but] I ended up selling enough of them to essentially break even."

As for lukeravenstahl.com? He bought it last year, a few weeks before Bob O'Connor's death lifted Mr. Ravenstahl into the mayor's office. He's been sitting on it since then, and has been changing the content on a daily basis only in the last week, once the Web site was discovered (Incidentally, there's also a lukeravenstal .com -- notice the missing "H" -- that somebody snapped up on May 11, after the other Web site was revealed).

"Last week, I received a phone call from someone inquiring about the name," said Mr. Parkinson, 38, in an e-mail interview. "I asked if they were calling on behalf of the mayor, and they said 'yes.' I gave them a quick sale price of $1,250, and I haven't heard back from them."

The asking price, he said, has risen since then.

"I have lots more material that I may put out there, so being able to have fun with the name is probably now worth more to me then the money. So the price has probably gone up a bit if I decide to sell," Mr. Parkinson said.

As for the other Luke Web site -- the one without the "H" in his last name -- that was registered by UltraRPM Inc., of Pasadena, Calif. That company, which traffics solely in domain-name speculation, says on its Web site that "UltraRPM does not intentionally register or use any domain name that is identical to or confusingly similar to any person's trademark."

Personal names are fair game, though, and Luke Ravenstahl is neither trademarked nor copyrighted. For Mr. Parkinson, it was an opportunity lost.

"I just wrote myself a note to buy that nam-- too late," he said. "If this site gets big, then those typos will get traffic."

Source

 

[Sarcle]

Aside from the obvious. The reporter didn't ask Mr. Parkinson if anyone had signed up through the porn link.

 

[ck89102]

Interesting fun article. Thank you for posting.

 

[petrosc]

Cybersquatters, who prefer to be called domain speculators, buy up Web site names they think might be bankable someday

And sometimes, cyber-squatting can be a lucrative business. This week, the domain porn .com sold for $9.5 million to a Detroit company.

now that is pissing me off... these reporters must learn something before they sit on their ass and write BS. How about learning the difference between squatting and speculating

 

[BidNo]

Cybersquatters, who prefer to be called domain speculators, buy up Web site names they think might be bankable someday

now that is pissing me off... these reporters must learn something before they sit on their ass and write BS. How about learning the difference between squatting and speculating

I feel the same way.

Everybody in the domain industry is painted with the same brush; akin to saying all lawyers are liers, all doctors are quacks and everybody from Tennessee is a hillbilly. And this is being said in many otherwise reputable publications. Everybody needs to take a role in educating the press and public. Cybersquatting is illegal. Domain investing is a thriving and legal business. And reporters who don't know the difference looks quite ignorant in making such statements.

Unfortunately the uninformed accept it as stated and associate all aspects of domains as sleezy, unethical, if not downright illegal. If we don't all work to get out this message, we'll all pay the price.

BTW, on a related note, I hope everyone will seriously consider joining the ICA.

 

[AlienGG]

Eactly. That was quite stupid.
I guess if the same reporter wrote about the acquisitions of Youtube and MySpace etc, he would have called them cybersquatting too. I don't really see much of difference between these two and porn.com, as they all make money and they were sold for the multiple of their revenue and potential.

 

[companyone]

It seems the word "Cybersquatter(s)" is used all the time to "slant" articles in a negitive way. This article uses the term in the headline along with a domain name and then in the very same article it has an "expert" explain why the owner of this domain its NOT "Cybersquattering".

The "power" of the pen.


Peace,
Dan

 

[Seraphim]

now that is pissing me off... these reporters must learn something before they sit on their ass and write BS. How about learning the difference between squatting and speculating

Ditto. The reporter is an idiot. I guess investment firms with huge real estate holdings, are "land squatters". That's ridiculous.

 

[NameGuy]

LOL. I'm the dunce who sold terribletowel.com for $20.

 

[Sarcle]

Unfortunately the uninformed accept it as stated and associate all aspects of domains as sleezy, unethical, if not downright illegal. If we don't all work to get out this message, we'll all pay the price.

BTW, on a related note, I hope everyone will seriously consider joining the ICA.

First for there to be a class action lawsuit there has to be proven monetary damages. Such as these stories showing to hurt overall sales. Considering domain sales are rising almost everyday. With the sale of Sex.com and Porn.com, et cetera. With sales prices rising everyday one could argue that these stories no matter how ignorant they are actually help the domaining world.

 

[Deleted member 70408]

I understand that the reporter wrote a piece that jumbled cybersquatters and domain investors together, but the jerkoff the article is about is someone that is making all legitimate domain investors look bad. Bottom line is that he IS a cybersquatter. He registered a famous person's name for the sole purpose of capitalizing on his notoriety in order to make money off of it. Not only is he a cybersquatter, but he is a dumb cybersquatter for sending that traffic to a porn site. This is not much different than the guy sitting in prison for registering Disney typos and sending the traffic to porn sites.

In my opinion, people like this are TERRIBLE for OUR industry. This is a clear violation of the Lanham Act, and if we, as legitimate domain investors do not condemn this type of bullshit, everyone will continue to lump us ALL together and condemn us all, just like this reporter is doing. I don't care if it's the Mayor of Pittsburgh, a famous actor or a little girl missing in Portugal, it is all the same Bullshit. The more negative ink about our business, the far more likely the government and other entities will react to crack down on our industry.

Go ahead and flame away, but the bottom line is that people like this, who think they are domain investors, are hurting us all.

-------------------
And furthermore, I did some research and this JERK has a history of doing the same shit with other names.

SonnyMartin.com (Country Singer)
Registrant:
Eric Parkinson
922 S Barrington Ave # 305
Los Angeles, California 90049
United States

Just a bit of the content currently being displayed. I also took a print screen for posterity:

sonnymartin.com
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