Even if you have never heard of any gambling websites you have certainly heard of the domain property Bodog.com. It so happens the domain was recently stolen in a court room. Curious? Bodog.com is a gambling website that does not operate within the United States but a United States Judge was hearing the case and he ruled against the foreign country who does own bodog.com for violation of a United States Patent. What happened was a Mr. Mel Molnick from Las Vegas, Nevada started a process patient for remote betting on the web in 1995 before it became illegal to do so in the United States. He sued Bodog.com in Seattle Washington for violating his patent but the gambling company ignored the lawsuit because they were not located in the United States.

The Judge resolved to make a default judgment against them because of failure to appear and because of that mistake on the part of Bodog.com the Judge ordered them to pay 48,937,456.00 and Mr. Molnick also got to have their registrar sign the domain name over to him. That is a lot of money and you would think that it was about the money but it really wasn’t it was about the domain name. Some argue that the ruling never should have come to pass because the Bodog.com owners do not live here and the patent is only good in the United States

These registrars live in root servers for dotcom name servers and they are located all over the world and they are actually controlled in the state of Virginia by a company called Verisign. It doesn’t matter if you add or delete items from dotcome name servers but they do pay the access fees and are able to do so. The case of Mr. Molnick had nothing to do with the fact that it never should have happened but the Judge in that case always side with the plaintiff because the defendants don’t show up. That is where the biggest problem lies. In the end it was a huge lesson for Bodog. But Bodog has the right to appeal but they need to file many motions here in the United States and then they will get a retrial but they need to do it soon because sports like Football are coming up and they will be missing out big time.