March 29th, 2013
My domains have been “Frozen”

My Guest blogger, Mark Hershiser has posted this blog>

I woke up this morning to an email that said “We have received a Temporary Restraining Order relating to domains in your account. We have disabled the domains.” Apparently domain investor Joel Williams and the company he was involved with BrandLab, are having some issues and BrandLab is claiming Joel sold or let domains expire that he did not have the right to sell or let expire? Why does this involve me? Because I bought a few of these domains, picked up a few at some domain auctions, and registered a few when they expired. I have also sold of few of them already. I am not sure about the BrandLab / Joel Williams relationship or any of the reasons behind the issues they are having but it seems these issues are between the defendant (Joel Williams) and the plaintiffs (Kimberly Dano, Roy Dano, Peter Azuolas, and BrandLab, LLC) and not the current domain holders like myself. I asked domain attorney Howard Neu what he thought and here is his response:

My suggestion at this point is to do nothing while hopefully the Tennessee Court sorts out the domains no longer owned by the Defendant. If nothing is done within the next 10 days, then you might need to file a motion with the court to release the names that you and your group owns as the Defendant no longer owns them. Howard Neu.

There are about 2200 domains listed in the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO), domains that are currently registered have been “frozen” at 5 registrars (Name.com, Dynadot.com, GoDaddy.com, Enom.com, DomainSite.com), about 450 domains in the list have expired and are available to register right now, this makes no sense at all? Frozen means the court ordered: “The parties are restrained from the transfer, sale, encumbrance or disposition of the assets of BrandLab,LLC except in the regular course of business, pending the temporary injunction hearing.” So now about a dozen domains I have are in this list and frozen at the registrars.

I won’t even go into all the reasons why I am sure what is happening here is wrong and nonsensical on many levels, but, if you have any thoughts on it or questions or this affects you I would love to hear about it.

TheDomains.com posted all about it here

Here is a copy of the TRO and Court Order