Court Says Domain Name Is Located Where Its Registrar Is Located Techdirt
Grill: What is your current address?Zuccarini: 957 Bristol Pike, Apartment D-6, Andalusia, Pennsylvania, 19020.
Q: Is that where you currently reside?
Zuccarini: Not to be sure.
Q: Where do you currently reside?
Zuccarini: I don't have - that's my legal address. I really don't have a permanent address at this period.
Q: Where do you currently reside?
Zuccarini: Right now, I am staying at the Millennium Hotel in New York.
Q: When you are not in New York for a deposition, where do you contemporary? Where have you lived in the past two weeks?
Zuccarini: I have been living in various places.
Q. What are the various places that you have been living?
Zuccarini: Friends' places. You be familiar with, that type of thing. Different hotels.
Q. 957 Bristol Pike is not your residence?
Zuccarini: No, it's not. It's my judiciary address. I have a lease on the apartment and that's where I have - some things are sent there which I get.
Q: Do you live in Pennsylvania?
Zuccarini: I don't remember. I don't have a permanent address so I can live anywhere. I don't live anywhere right now. I can't give you a permanent address. registry of that domain is located (pdf) rather than wherever John Zuccarini may be hiding at the blink. Since, in this case, the registry was VeriSign, and VeriSign is in Northern California... the court was ruled to be the distinct jurisdiction. Update : Originally, we noted that this said it was where the registrar was located, but it actually goes further -- saying that it's where the registry is located. Way back when, the two things were the same (and they were all Network Solutions), but now you have distinct registrars for top level domains, but one registrar that maintains the overall database of each top-level domain name. This ruling says that while in the on people might focus on the registr ar , it also applies to the registr y .
While the court does explain that this appears to be strictly what our anti-cybersquatting laws say when it comes to jurisdiction, that does lead to some other interesting permissible questions when it comes to jurisdictions. It seems like it could be somewhat troubling if your domain is officially located wherever the registrar is in other types of cases, as on the spur of the moment anyone registering a domain name needs to take into account the location of the registrar in case of a lawsuit.
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They cite headquarters specifically, not physical location of the servers hosting the database. So if the registry merged with or was captivated over by a company in a different state (let's say Virginia since someone mentioned it above) and its headquarters was no longer in California, then all those hapless domain name owners could on the spur of the moment find themselves subject to a different jurisdiction - even if all the registry's employees and all the same servers stayed there in the same edifice in California, just because somewhere else was designated as the HQ. From the court ruling: [9] Because VeriSign has its headquarters in the Northern Division of California, the district court had quasi in rem jurisdiction over the domain names registered with VeriSign for purposes of appointing a receiver to work for in executing a judgment against the owner of the names.
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