Yeah, how dare that old cunt take this domain away from a cybersquatter!!

What is this, 1998?

Hmm.. If he's just a squatter, it's one thing, but if he's been actually using this domain for a business (as he claims), it gets kind of murky. Just because she's more famous, she gets to have his property taken from him and handed over to her? Not saying he's not a squatter, but the rules about this ARE arbitrary and weird, and favor the rich and powerful.

Reminds me of the giant lawsuit that Nissan Motors has been pursuing against a man named Uzi Nissan, who got the domain nissan.com for his computer business before they thought to register it. He's been fighting them for years.

It almost looks like a bad google/babelfish translation, in which case I applaud them for throwing "karma is a bitch" out there.

If you look at web.archive.org, it looks like the website actually belonged to Kingsolver (the author) before. My guess is they let the registration lapse, this Chinese guy grabbed it in the meantime, now they're calling daddy to clean up their mistake.

What I *don't* see is any record of this guy using the domain for his business.

Reading through the arbitration report, it appears as if the Chinese business, Kingsolver Computer Solutions, had not yet created a webpage. Kingsolver Computer Solutions claims it had purchased the domain for $1,888 and had left the existing website unchanged. That old website? It was a bunch of links to information about Barbara Kingsolver that may, or may not, have paid money for incoming internet traffic.

If Kingsolver Computer Solutions had put up a real website trying to sell its services, it might still have the domain.

Also: birth control. For those children he complains so much about having.

Yeah, because a business in China just happens to be called "Barbara Kingsolver" and need the domain name "Barbara Kingsolver". Some guy, in no way, decided to register it just to swindle the author Barbara Kingsolver out of it. In fact in Chinese his name just happens to be "Barbara Kingsolver". Suuuurrre.

Uh, #7? The domain is kingsolver.com and the business is King Solver.

She's one of my favorite authors and I am bummed to see someone calling her an ugly old cunt. That's just mean.

Sounds like Barbra didn't keep up the payments on her domain. So...if I just simply forget to pay the mortgage on my house, and the bank sells it to someone else, do I get my house back because everyone I know expects to find me living there?

I have several of my own domains and keeping track of when the payments on them are due isn't exactly a hardship. You get emails from your registrar periodically asking you to check your whois info and make sure it's up to date and that alone should remind you to check when the domain expires. Furthermore, many registrars let you set up an auto renew feature, and lock the domain so it can't be transferred unless you take the extra step of unlocking it yourself.

She wasn't paying attention. She didn't pay her rent basically and she lost the property. Someone else bought it. It sure doesn't look to me like he's squatting but so what if he is? If Barbra can't be bothered to pay attention to her web site enough that she lets her domain lapse then it must not have been all that important to her to begin with.

I'm sorry if that sounds cold, but this whole idea of corporations so big or people supposedly so famous they're just entitled to their own domains simply on the basis of their being really really big or theoretically famous really bothers me. This lady get a trademark on the name Kingsolver? If someone else with that last name wrote a book, would they have to use an alias or something?

It's at least a decade too late for anyone to give a shit about fights over domain names.

@ 10, a mortgage =/= a domain. And please go read the comments @ 4 and 5 and follow the links. They explain exactly why it's as fair as can be that this domain was given back to Barbara (not "Barbra") Kingsolver, lapsed registration or no.

a mortgage =/= a domain

Right...and apparently not all Kingsolvers are equal either. Look...she let her registration lapse. Someone else picked it up. The only thing that keeps that from being the end of the story is this idea that she's Entitled to that domain somehow because she's such a Famous Author or something. I'm sorry but this prerogatives of the rich and famous crap is getting a little old. She let it lapse, at least that's what I'm hearing here, and that should have been that. We all have to pay our bills.

Barbra Barbara...whatever.