Isn’t free, Thursday edition — Domain privacy

Responding to lawsuits is expensive.

I keep preaching regarding how providing whois privacy services isn’t free for domain registrars, and here’s another example.

Timothy Sykes has just sued Moniker (pdf) in federal district court to find out the identity of the owner of PennyStockAlerts.com, which is protected by whois privacy. Skyes is only following the identify of the owner, not Moniker itself. But the firm will have to respond. That costs money.

Skyes wants the identity since of alleged defamation.

He states that the registrant for the domain uses the alias “Stock Psycho”, but following an “exhaustive investigation”, that person’s true identity is unknown.

A little tip for Sykes’ lawyer: if you look at the historical whois records for the domain from last year I think you’ll figure out who owns it. And you might check out a little research tool called Google. It’s amazing what you can turn up.