I knew Mark Warrick was a spammer but WTF?

[LBmtb]

The mark warrick guy that I just banned was a big time spammer. But this is pretty bad.

ALL of these websites are the exact same site:

http://www.orange-county-mountain-biking.com/
http://3fbc.com/
http://www.3fmtbc.com/
http://www.3fbicyclingclub.com/
http://www.theoutdoorsclub.org/
http://www.3fbikeclub.com/
http://3fracing.com/
http://www.3sbc.com/
http://www.3friders.com/
http://www.orangecountymountainbiking.com/
http://www.3sbc.com/index.cfm
http://socaltrailrider.org/

Look at the last one. Trying to leech off of our good name. Okay - so who knows something about domains and laws and such?

[foofighter]

dang that's nuts

[dstepper]

Wonder what the three F's really stand for.

[scorns]

food fellowship fun

[Mudman]

what the heck!
whats the deal with this guy man...

[OTHRIDER]

[FONT=Tahoma]Okay - so who knows something about domains and laws and such?[/FONT]

And Such....... I am fully capable of reaching out and touching someone at 800 yards. BOATS, will you be my spotter?

.......[FONT=Trebuchet MS]maybe I read a little too much into this one?[/FONT] Damn gypsies piss me off something fierce

[LBmtb]

So I reported the spam to google and sent an email to outdoors club who also had their domain taken advantage of. What else to do ...?

[bjammin]

Originally Posted by LBmtb

So I reported the spam to google and sent an email to outdoors club who also had their domain taken advantage of. What else to do ...?

Contact the people that "sponsor" his site. It looks as if a few local shops have banners on the top of his home page.

[foofighter]

if you have legal friends that are familiar with cyber law and squatters you can have them send a letter letting them know that they are breaking some sort of law...i'm sure there is because i'm sure if someone was squatting on a site that was similar to chevrolet but spelled wrong they would be all over that w/ their legal department.

[Collette]

I'll see if any of my law professors know of any other avenues.

[RustyIron]

Originally Posted by LBmtb

http://socaltrailrider.org/

Look at the last one. Trying to leech off of our good name. Okay - so who knows something about domains and laws and such?

Sorry George,
It doesn't look to me like you have a legal beef with this loser. On the bright side, think about what he's doing. He's spending is money on a host and on domain names, hoping to capitalize on being a third-party web marketer.

I'll bet he bores with the whole exercise and eventually crawls back into his hole. After all, how much money can he be making?

Take a look at some of the articles he offers up -- and there are a LOT of them. Google on some of the phrases he uses. You'll find that the articles are blatant plagiarism, word for word.

THOSE authors have a legal beef with this guy. But realistically, what are they going to do? Hire a big dollar lawyer to bring down this nickel and dime chump? Probably not.

If it's any consolation, you're not alone. It happens to just about everyone who has a popular domain.

Rob

[LBmtb]

Not entirely true that I can't do anything. I'm sending emails with evidence to all the ad networks he uses. Hopefully he gets his accounts terminated from at least some of them. I might also use my contact at yahoo to get him kicked off the yahoo publishing network.

And I still have some cybersquatting law to read up on ...

In order for a trademark owner to bring a claim under the ACPA, the owner must establish

• the trademark owner’s mark is distinctive or famous;
• the domain name owner acted in bad faith to profit from the mark; and
• the domain name and the trademark are either identical or confusingly similar (or dilutive for famous trademarks).

[Flat Broke]

Okay George,

Here's what I know of bumpin domain squatters. First and foremost, how much does this mean to you? The reason being is that to get him to drop the domain may cost money on your behalf. How much money is directly related to how badly he wants to keep the domain and the lengths he's willing to go through to demonstrate he has an organization of similar namesake. While you would be able to take the socaltrailrider.org domain from him, it might require a trip to the courthouse to do so.

If you've trademarked SoCalTrailRiders, life is easier as some Registrars will boot him from the domain if you can prove you had a legal claim to the namesake. I have a family member that worked for Verisign, and one of the major responsibilities she had was to make sure that her customers(think Nintendo, Chevron, etc) could obtain their domain names if some squatter moved in each time a new TLD (top level domain, ie. the .com, .tv, .au, etc) was released. While law differs from country to country, a trademark on the name here pretty much takes the wind out of the sails for any squatter's claim for .com, .net .org .tv and .us to start. Unless he/she can demonstrate how the domain is relevant to their business or organization and different from your trademarked name, you should be in pretty good shape.

Without a trademark, I'm guessing you'd probably have to be able to prove damages of some sort to substantiate an injunction against him using the name. This is obviously where the costs start to add up quickly and why you still hear of companies just paying for the domain rather than taking it to court. They know damn good and well that they would win in court, but the cost and often more important aspect of time involved with taking the issue to court is not worth the relatively small amount the larger corporations pay out for a domain.

As an example, my wife’s uncle had a domain that related to the Nationals MLB team. He had registered the domain years prior, I guess with the intent of doing something patriotic with it (he wasn't squatting as it was one of a handful of domains he had). When the expansion came through, he received correspondence offering to buy the name. They threw out a five figure offer, he didn't get back to them as fast as they would have liked, and they upped the offer a couple ten grand. Needless to say, he took it; but the point is that the 50 or 60k they paid for the domain was "cheaper" to them than getting attorneys involved and possibly delaying the acquisition of the name. So while you could very well have a solid case to keep him from using the domain and possibly forcing transfer of the domain to your control; how much is it worth to you in terms of time and money?

I'd say start off with a letter from an attorney that spells out how his use of the name infringes upon what you are doing with STR, and see how things go. If this guy is like lots of other folks, he probably got a hard on for registering names because he equates websites to possessions, and possessions to self worth.

Honestly, unless the guy is really doing something that undermines the great things that you've already done with the name, I wouldn't worry about it. My brother and I threw an event out at the river for a couple of years. It got pretty big, and we had registered the domain across a couple of TLDs etc. Well there was a common acronym for our event, and a cook who was trying to do something similar registered the acronym. It burned me up, but in the end didn't matter. Unless he actually had the balls to try and use our event's name to host new events he basically paid his money to lock up the domain for no good reason. My brother and I got over it and didn't really care. Had he actually done something libelous with the domain I would have taken legal action, but outside of that, he was/is just another cook who gets off on paying money each month/year to have a bunch of websites about nothing.

Chris

I forgot to add one little dig... Make sure the meta on your site includes his domain name. That way, anyone searching for his site might actually find yours and then you profit(not literally of course) from his action.

[Collette]

George (and everyone else), you have got to read this:

[SIZE=3]http://www.3fbc.com/blogs/?p=279[/SIZE]

[ericfoltz]

Pretty funny. One of the biggest route liars on GL is a member of 3F. Maybe the 3 = Fraud, Farce, Fantasy.

[LBmtb]

Originally Posted by Collette

George (and everyone else), you have got to read this:

[SIZE=3]http://www.3fbc.com/blogs/?p=279[/SIZE]

Classic!

[Flat Broke]

Originally Posted by Pain Freak

Can't we just beat him up?

Better than that, just hack his server and upload the STR site on the knock off domain too.

And of course if that's not good enough, we could get a crew together and show up to one of their scheduled rides

Chris

[spookydave]

who is this guy and what was he trying to sell anyway?
I've got no puppy in this fight, just asking.

I know he posted a few rides. Do people have to pay to go on those?

[Chaos]

edit: nevermind. Collette beat me to it

so he's posted his banning in one of his blogs
blah blah blah
leave a message if you feel like it

wasn't one of the main guys from Team Basso named Mark Warrick?
I don't really remember.