{"id":28445,"date":"2012-01-24T16:38:36","date_gmt":"2012-01-24T20:38:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=28445"},"modified":"2012-01-24T16:38:36","modified_gmt":"2012-01-24T20:38:36","slug":"who-says-the-law-isnt-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=28445","title":{"rendered":"Who says the law isn’t fun?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone always asserts, I believe incorrectly, that the law is boring.\u00a0 Oh hellz to the no.\u00a0 Dude, nothing funnier than a good law suit.\u00a0 So a buddy of mine shared a case with me today that illustrates this perfectly.\u00a0 You don’t need to read the whole thing of course, but a taste of this shows you the kind of humor you can find, even in the relatively mundane area of Tort law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cSex on the Internet?,\u201d they all said. \u201cThat<\/em>\u2019ll never make any money.\u201d But computer-geek-turned-entrepreneur Gary Kremen knew an opportunity when he saw it. The year was 1994; domain names were free for the asking, and it would be several years yet before Henry Blodget and hordes of eager NASDAQ day traders would turn the Internet into the Dutch tulip craze of our times. With a quick e-mail to the domain name registrar Network Solutions, Kremen became the proud owner of sex.com. He registered the name to his business, Online Classifieds, and listed himself as the contact.<\/p>\n

Con man Stephen Cohen, meanwhile, was doing time for impersonating a bankruptcy lawyer. He, too, saw the potential of the domain name. Kremen had gotten it first, but that was only a minor impediment for a man of Cohen\u2019s boundless resource and bounded integrity. Once out of prison, he sent Network Solutions what purported to be a letter he had received from Online Classifieds. It claimed the company had been \u201cforced to dismiss Mr. Kremen,\u201d but \u201cnever got around to changing our administrative contact with the internet registration [sic] and now our Board of directors has decided to abandon <\/em>the domain name sex.com.\u201d Why was this unusual letter being sent via Cohen rather than to Network Solutions directly? It explained:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Because we do not have a direct connection to the internet, we request that you notify the internet registration on our behalf, to delete our domain name sex.com. Further, we have no objections to your use of the domain name sex.com and this letter shall serve as our authorization to the internet registration to transfer sex.com to your corporation.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Despite the letter\u2019s transparent claim that a company called \u201cOnline <\/em>Classifieds\u201d had no Internet connection, Network Solutions made no effort to contact Kremen. Instead, it accepted the letter at face value and transferred the domain name to Cohen. When Kremen contacted Network Solutions some time later, he was told it was too late to undo the transfer. Cohen went on to turn sex.com into a lucrative online porn empire.<\/p>\n

And so began Kremen\u2019s quest to recover the domain name that was rightfully his.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Anyway, from there it goes on that this guy (Kremen) gets a judgment against the con man, who in turn flees to Mexico.<\/p>\n

Then things started getting really <\/em>bizarre. Kremen put up a \u201cwanted\u201d poster on the sex.com site with a mug shot of Cohen, offering a $50,000 reward to anyone who brought him to justice. Cohen\u2019s lawyers responded with a motion to vacate the arrest warrant. They reported that Cohen was under house arrest in Mexico and that gunfights between Mexican authorities and would-be bounty hunters seeking Kremen\u2019s reward money posed a threat to human life.<\/strong> The district court rejected this story as \u201cimplausible\u201d and denied the motion. Cohen, so far as the record shows, remains at large.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Now come on, that is downright hilarious, no?\u00a0 It\u2019s got porn, con men, Mexican Federales, Bounty Hunters and an internet company without internet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0BTW- In a huge bit of irony, the opinion was written by Ninth Circuit Chief Justice who himself would later get caught up in his own porn issues.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone always asserts, I believe incorrectly, that the law is boring.\u00a0 Oh hellz to the no.\u00a0 … Who says the law isn’t fun?<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}