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HOMEPAGE
THE CliffR
PROJECT
SUPPLEMENTARY - ‘THE SAGA OF STOLEN
LOOK.COM
’
© CliffR Projections, Canada,
1998-2008.
ANOTHER CRAZY STOLEN DOMAIN NAME CAPER
For Immediate Release
Some of you may remember the
saga of stolen domain name Sex.com. The name was stolen in the latter
nineties by an internet guru who faxed phoney documents to Network
Solutions who was the Registrar at the time. The original owner and the
thief finally settled out of court for 65 million dollars. An initial
payment was made. Then the thief fled to the Cayman
Islands putting him out of jurisdiction and
stiffing the victim.
The crook was eventually discovered in Brazil around
2005, and is now back in the US in
jail. The victim eventually won a 14 million dollar lawsuit against
Network Solutions for unwitting conversion.
Well, deja vu. It’s happened all
over again with domain name Look.com. In late 2003 a rouge business
partner stole domain name Look.com from the owners. Current online
appraisals for Look.com value it at more than 4 million dollars. The
victims, two brothers, ended up on old age pension and were unable to
raise funds for proper legal help. They were able at least to get the
Registrar, Bulk Register Inc. to put a binding anti transfer lock on
the name. Which prevented the thief from selling it. Two Vancouver
businessmen, a lawyer and a millionaire, offered to help the two
brothers get Look.com back. Then used the very document they had
persuaded the brothers to sign for the purpose to steal Look.com bare
faced for themselves. Proving once and for all that the list of lawyers
and millionaires going to hell grows bigger by the minute.
Specifically, on June 4, 2007 the two
Vancouver parties
sold Look.com to InterSearch Inc, of California for a
reputed $600,000.00. InterSearch was well aware of the dispute over the
name but took the Vancouver parties
word for it that the brothers were on old age pension and
wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. Proving once and for
all that bottom feeding doesn’t always have to occur under water.
The hilarious part is that the Registrant, now a part of eNom Inc. of
Belleview Washington, got it in reverse and asked the original party
against whom the brothers had secured the anti transfer lock to
authorize the transfer of Look.com to InterSearch. Leaving themselves
open for a stupendous lawsuit and proving once and for all that not all
fools sit in classroom corners.
The two brothers are undertaking to get
Look.com back anyway despite their poverty. A David and Goliath kind of
thing. Ironically as it may sound, they are way better off than
originally. Now they not only have getting the name back, but a lawsuit
against the two Vancouver parties for conversion by theft and a big one
against the Registrant eNom Inc. for unwitting conversion. Even better,
they also now have incontestable proof that the two Vancouver parties
sold a domain name which was not legally theirs to sell as ammo for
getting it back from InterSearch.
The only steps left are that they need
a lawyer from the State of Washington and
from the State of California to
represent them in the respective jurisdictions. If anyone is interested
please email clifflive@rogers.com, as things are now ready to proceed.
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30 –
Details:
The whole story of Look.com sounds so
incredulous that it reads a bit like someone has written a comical
short story for the Pulitzer competition. It all started on April 19, 1994 when my
brother and I obtained Look.com off the Internet for the modest sum of
thirty five dollars.
We had a small
antivirus software business at the time which eventually became Look
Software Systems Inc. and had decided to join the embryonic bandwagon.
The internet had only one hundred and fifty thousand domain names at
the time and who would have thought. Now it's well over four billion.
In the melt down of Intelligence called
the dot com craze during the late nineties, Look.com rose
astronomically in value. We found that out the hard way when someone
asked us one day if we had sold Look.com because it was up for sale at www.greatdomains.com for a cool
fifteen millions dollars. !!!???!!!
Turns out a former executive of Look Software
had piked Look.com for himself because nobody had been watching. He had
tanked the antivirus business, so Greydie and I had became stuck
delivering pizzas to get by on and not watching the shop.
We eventually got it back. But by then
dot com had sunk faster than the anchor of the Queen Mary and I
couldn't sell it for love or money. At the beginning of two thousand
and one I started up a search engine website called www.look.com in order to build
Look.com's traffic numbers up while waiting for dotcoms to spring back
to life like a phoenix from the ashes.
At the beginning of two thousand and two I
brought in a guy to help raise funds. His name was Laszlo, he’s
Hungarian you know. In the beginning of two thousand and three Laszlo
whomped up a supposed partnership and lease agreement for Look.com
ending on January
2, 2013, which he called Look on the Web. Laszlo
said that Look on the Web was to give our operation the allure of
respectability in case anybody with money ever actually came along.
Laszlo never raised a penny. By default
he eventually took over running the web server because we could no
longer afford anybody professional who actually knew what they were
doing.
A well known proverb says, ‘If a
Hungarian enters a revolving door behind you, they will come out in
front’. You think it’s kidding, no it’s not. Because
Laszlo, he’s Hungarian you know, ended up commandeering website www.look.com in early October
2003. Then commandeered Look.com using identity theft on the Internet
to protect his commandeering of the website.
You will remember that Laszlo was by
now the main administrative contact for the server. I was supposed to
be the assistant administrative contact which would have given me likewise
access to the server and a say in its goings on. Not an outlandish
proposition despite my lack of technical skills, considering that I had
bought the stupid thing with my own stupid money just the year before.
At any rate, along the way Laszlo had
secretly removed me as the assistant administrative contact. In effect
commandeering our web server and web site by shutting me out. But now
as the exclusive administrative contact for the server, Laszlo had
unobstructed access to all the personal email addresses going through.
Specifically mine. That meant in particular, the all important
administrative contact email address for my domain name registrant
account at Bulk Register.
Laszlo ended up
stealing that particular email address by the simple expedience of
redirecting it to himself and approving the change when the hosting
company support staff asked if was ok to make the change. Now comes the
part which I find the hardest to take. Laszlo also had my Registrant
account number because it turns out he had also been snooping through
my emails for some time. So he simply went online at Bulk
Register’s website, logged in using the account number which he
had conveniently scoped out, asked the login box to send him a new
password because he had forgotten the old one, (I guess forgot), and
Bulk Register dutifully sent him a new one on, you guessed it, my
stolen email address.
Laszlo now had both my account number
and a new password. Who went straight into the account and overwrote
the whole ownership record as though he had always been the proud
owner. Basically, instantly, high jacking the whole account. When Bulk
Register sent out an email stating that someone had changed the
information in the account and was it ok or not to process it into
their record, guess which email address they sent it along on. Laszlo
simply clicked the ’I Approve’ option, absconding in a
blink of an eye with my whole Bulk Register account and Look.com in it.
Where abscond means to move about in mysterious ways, usually with the
property of another.
Bulk Register, the ‘Bury their
heads in the sand’ record holder of the century said,
‘Tough, go sue’. And what’s a boy to do. What is
really hilarious about all this is that Bulk Register’s website at
the time was proudly proclaiming that sic, ‘It is impossible for
anyone to steal your domain names with us. I suppose that’s not
any worse than tobacco companies saying sic, ’May be hazardous to
your health’, un sic.
What’s even more hilarious is
that a friend had called just before and said, ‘You’re
running your Registrant administrative contact email address through
your web server’. I said, ‘So’? He said but that
means Laszlo can steal your email address in order to steal Look.com
and there is nothing you can do about it. I replied like the head in
the sand dodo of the century, ‘Laszlo would never do anything
like that’. Then exactly ten days later Laszlo did exactly that.
Proving once and for all that if you can't trust a Hungarian who can
you trust.
In my defence I have to say that at the
time I didn’t know that Laszlo had already boogied south with our
web server by cutting me out as an administrative contact. I discovered
that the hard way when I went to the server hosting company to ask them
to please change my stolen email address back. They said, ‘Tough,
go sue’, you’re not an administrative contact any more.
!!!???!!! I have to admit that Laszlo had really done his homework on
this one. Proving yet again, never let the water boy know what
you’re doing.
The next phase gets even more
unpalatable to the palette. All my brother and my incomes had been tied
to the up and coming potentials of www.look.com. Except for pithy
amounts delivering pizzas part time, shovelling snow, moving lawns,
etc., we had no income at all except what was supposedly going to come
in from www.look.com
eventually. Which was already at about two thousand a month when Laszlo
swift boated it, so was definitely not something to be laughed at.
We were suddenly and very definitely stuck way behind the eight
ball. In emergency we decided to go out and start selling flowers in
the bars and restaurants around Ottawa at
night until Old Age pension kicked in about eight months later. At the
tender age of sixty four I might add. A man’s gotta do what a
man’s gotta to do to be sure, but give me a break already.
Selling flowers meant enough money for
rent and groceries coming in every day, and no doubt saved our
buttinskies sure enough, but no money for anything fancy like movies
and lawyer’s fees. And I couldn’t find a lawyer for love or
honey to take on the case on the prospects of a big payout at the end.
I even tried
starting with the A’s in the Yellow Pages, and by the time I got
to the E’s I was forced to accept the dismal fact that lawyers
are nowhere near as well connected to the 'maybe' side of money as they
are to the 'sure thing' side. Where a good lawyer is someone who knows
who to pull favours from when the going get rough.
Enter now the two Vancouver parties
who were directly out of Swindler’s List. Specifically, Mathews
the lawyer, was from Vancouver itself.
Stark the millionaire was from Kelowna British
Columbia about two hundred and fifty
miles away by car.
My brother and I had done business with
Mathews and Stark in the twilight days of the antivirus business. When
Look.com had originally been pilfered by our former anti virus
executive, Mathews and Stark had come timely to the rescue by putting
up $50,000.00 to get it back. And ended up with a collateral of 25%
each in Look.com for their trouble. Which eventually morphed to our
getting their fifty percent back subject only to paying them back their
$50,000.00 with no time frame attached for when to do it.
Nothing, I repeat nothing pulls a wolf
out from under the sheepskin faster than a nice big juicy leg to chew
on. When Mathews and Stark heard about the new opportunity opened up by
Laszlo, they tooketh to it as doth the greedy horsefly taketh to the
Camel’s dung.
Their proposal
was that we sign a Consent Motion giving them full ownership of
Look.com through the collateral agreement as a way of wresting control
of Look.com back from Laszlo.
Who gave us a
boat load of promises and assurances that all the old agreements and
tenants would still exist between us, and that they would never try and
use the Consent Motion to sell Look.com out from under us. Proving once
and again that you can’t take a millionaire or a lawyer at face
value.
After my having once said that sic,
‘Laszlo would never do that’, I bit again and said to
myself sic, ‘Mathews and Stark would never do that’.
Greydie and I consequently bit and signed the Consent Motion. Proving
once and for all that once a sucker always a sucker.
The Consent Motion turned out to be so
poorly construed that it was unable to get control of Look.com back
from Laszlo. In desperation I decided to throw caution to the winds and
give it a go as my own self litigant without any previous courtroom
experience whatsoever, or any exposure to the civil courts of law under
any circumstances.
Turns out that trying to self litigate
yourself is a little bit like trying to push string. Not that Judges
are particularly biased against self litigants you understand, but most
Judges tend to turn up the volume on the rules for politically correct
litigating procedures whenever self litigants are involved because of
the prevailing belief, probably true, that self litigants are arrogant
self professing donkey orfices who think they know everything.
Judges have a rather simple way to deal
with these kinds of pests, and really stick it to them about proper
rules of procedure in order to give them a quick taste of what
law’s all about.
If even one picayune little rule of law
is not followed to the letter, the Judge would find that sufficient
grounds for dismissing their whole action. Since any honest self
litigant like me wouldn’t be expected to know what even the
clunky rules of procedure were let alone the tiny little picayune ones,
the result wasn’t pretty.
In the
end result I had gone into it having it all wrong. I had gone in like a
stupid fool thinking it was all about justice. I thus presented my
whole case from a very carefully worked out point of view of right
versus wrong. Whereas the court system in fact actually deals with
everything from a ’how much money do you make in a year’
point of view.
Canada’s
system of Justice was borrowed from England
virtually as is back in the good old days when Canada was
still being founded. The British system had been set up during the
middle ages to insure the pursuits of the Aristocracy against the
complaints of the poor. The American system is completely different.
It’s set up to insure the pursuits of the Aristocracy against everybody.
At any rate the
Canadian system never changed. Nowadays Judges rule in favour of those
who are more successful within the system against those who are not out
of respect for their successes. Since I barely made a dime every year
you can guess how much respect I got. Not only did I not get control of
the domain name back, Laszlo got excusive rights to operate the website
as he saw fit.
In hindsight I
figured I would have been more successful walking into Saddam
Hussein’s living room and asking for amnesty.
As Laszlo saw fit meant that he
didn’t have a clue. The website started falling in traffic like
shells dropping out of a twenty one gun salute. To try and save the day
for himself, Laszlo decided to sell Look.com to InterSearch for a song
in the fall of 2004.
He made the deal
in secret, then asked me for my approval to put it through. Huh!
That’s a bit like stealing your expensive Mercedes, selling it to
somebody in Nigeria for a fraction of its value, then asking you to
come down to the docks and sign off on the transfer papers.
Predictably I said no. Predictably
Laszlo forced the sale to arbitration. Predictably Mathews said,
‘Hey gang I know what, let’s present the Consent Motion to
the arbitration to stop the sale’. Having been dumber than a wind
up rocket motor twice already
before, I thought to myself, ‘Why break up a good streak’,
and said, ‘Ok’. Oiyve!
I went into the arbitration as a
defendant and learned yet again that truth is no defence. Nonetheless,
in the end result the arbitration didn’t come out all that badly.
Even though it ruled that Laszlo would continue to be the exclusive
operator of the website to no one’s general benefit, it also
ruled that Look Software Systems Inc., remained as the owner of Look.com
until the end of the Look on the Web partnership and lease dated January 2, 2013. Then
because of the Consent Motion et al, Look.com should revert to Mathews
and Stark.
The part I didn’t like was that
arbitrator also stated that I was near delusional in my belief that
somebody was always trying to steal my creative works. Who clearly
didn’t understand the meaning of the term ‘Identity
theft’. He also stated that I needed to be watched because I
chose my evidences to be self serving. I had particular trouble with
that one, as I found it more than little hard to imagine someone going
into court over the last thirty five hundred years with evidences which
were not self serving.
Apparently the more than fourteen times
I had said, ‘Laszlo lied in his materials, here’s
proof’, had overloaded the arbitrator’s perception of blind
justice so much that his eyeballs had rolled out onto the floor trying
to figure out a way to still respect his successes.
At any rate I didn’t sweat the
overall rulings too much at the time because I figured I had until 2013
to deal with the problem. Plus after all, I still had Mathews and
Stark’s fried green pledges and promises in my back pocket to
fall back on if things started going like the Italians say, ’Noa
so well’.
Good thing too. For being true to their
respective Lawyer and millionaire creeds, Mathews and Stark said to
themselves, ’Ah, Cliff and his brother are now stuck on Old Age
Pension for the rest of their lives so what are they going to
do!’.
Calling it an
epiphany of a lifetime, they proceeded to sell Look.com to InterSearch
themselves, claiming that the arbitration award had given them Look.com
on the spot by forgetting to mention the all important little data fact
that Look Software Systems Inc. owned Look.com until 2013. Plus the
other little detail that we would still own it after 2013 because of
all their pledges and assurances in sucking us in to sign their
original Consent Motion.
They also hoodwinked eNom Inc. into
executing the domain name ownership transfer to InterSearch based on
the same plop of deception. And also managed to convince the dumb
clucks that the domain name dispute had been between themselves and
Laszlo instead of between myself and Laszlo in order to get them to
execute the transfer by asking Laszlo and not me for permission to go
ahead.
In fact, nobody even bothered to
contact me about it at all. It was a bit like three wolves and a lamb
discussing dinner. The wolves talk it over amongst themselves but
nobody asks the lamb. I mean you just can’t write this kind of
stuff.
I’m still not sure if you should
call all this the Twilight Zone or a Fool’s Paradise. I guess it
depends on whose side of the fence you’re standing on. I do
know however that at least someday in the near future, somebody is
going to wake up pretty sorry and I’m pretty sure it isn't going
to be the lamb or the lamb's brother.
Since nobody can say with certainty how
long it's going to take to ultimately get Look.com back into our eager
awaiting possession, in the meantime I've started up a pro tem website
called www.wholelook.com.
Wholelook.com will specifically be a part of the whole new Look.com
site once I'm back in the saddle.
Wwww.wholelook.com is a daily set of neat little jokes and
humorous nifty little things. As they say, 'laughter is the best
medicine'. And why not, its way cheaper than Healthcare. And also not
to worry, it’s all good clean Walt Disney approved fun, at least
as far as the Disney Corp used to be. So even your kids can come away
from the site unblemished, uncorrupted, and not under arrest.
In a final note, here’s where the
sniveling and groveling part comes in. If you like www.wholelook.com a
whole lot please pass it on. If not, then please don't pass it on. If
you want to help on the legal side of things as a lawyer or with money,
please get in touch with me asap at the email contact below. If you
don't want to help, please have a nice day anyway and sit back and
enjoy the show.
Thanks and bless,
Cliff Livingstone, CliffR.
: clifflive@rogers.com
WHOLELOOK.COM
CHAPTER 1,
CHAPTER 4, CHAPTER 26, CHAPTER 34
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