Chris

Thought your position was that you above chit-chat in
this forum. You should have used the puppet or will he
be on later with more links on his site.

Love

Ches

 --- Chris Disspain <ceo&#167;auda.org.au> wrote: 
> "Pair misled UK companies over domain names
> Australian Financial Review (Information) Sep 23
> Rachael Osman-Chin 
> The man behind the scheme that misled 10,000
> Australian businesses into buying domain names they
> didn't need was
> yesterday found to have engaged in misleading
> conduct with a similar scheme in the United Kingdom.
> 
> Chesley Rafferty, the 25-year-old Perth man behind
> Domain Names Australia, and his associate Bradley
> Norrish were found
> to have tried to mislead 50,000 UK businesses.
> 
> The ruling in the Federal Court in Perth comes a
> week after a decision that cleared the way for
> Australian businesses to
> seek damages from Domain Names Australia, following
> court action by the Australian Competition and
> Consumer Commission
> and the non-profit internet authority .au Domain
> Administration (auDA).
> 
> The court found yesterday that an employee of
> Diverse Internet, of which Mr Norrish was a director
> and half-owner,
> developed a computer program to gather more than
> 2million domain names in the UK from Nominet UK, the
> official central
> registry for UK-based internet domain names, in
> January 2003.
> 
> This information was used by Internet Registry,
> another company controlled by Rafferty, to send
> 50,000 notices to UK
> businesses implying they were in danger of losing
> their current .co.uk domain name unless they sent a
> registration fee
> to Mr Norrish's company.
> 
> Mr Norrish told the court it was Mr Rafferty who
> told the employee to get the mailing information
> from Nominet UK, and
> that he was merely passing that information on.
> 
> Nominet UK was the complainant in the Federal Court
> action. 
> "It lies beyond the limits of credulity to suppose
> that Mr Norrish, in telling Mr Gusenzow [the
> employee] to act
> according to MrRafferty's instructions, had no idea
> of what Mr Gusenzow was going to do," Justice Robert
> French said.
> "He was not operating at arm's length from Mr
> Rafferty."
> 
> Justice French found the two men used the heading
> "UK Internet Registry" above a London address to
> mislead the
> recipients into thinking the company sending the
> notice was authorised by Nominet UK.
> 
> He also found the fact that the pair were in fact
> selling registrations of .com domains rather than
> re-registrations of
> existing .co.uk domain names was misleading and not
> just a clever marketing ploy.
> 
> On three occasions last year, thousands of
> Australian businesses received official-looking
> letters stating the need for
> the recipient to protect their domain names by
> registering one or a small number of domain names.
> 
> At the bottom of the letter there was a payment slip
> asking for the recipient to enclose a cheque for
> $237 and a return
> address.
> 
> As with the UK letters, if recipients took the time
> to study the letter they might have realised the
> domain name or
> names that DNA was proposing to register were
> slightly different from the one their company was
> actually using, for
> example ending in .com rather than .com.au.
> 
> DNA is the third incarnation of Mr Rafferty's scheme
> in two years. 
> A hearing as to damages as a result of the latest
> case will be held at a later date."
> 
> Cheers,
> 
>  
> 
> Chris Disspain
> 
> CEO - auDA
> 
> ceo&#167;auda.org.au
> 
> www.auda.org.au
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  

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