There was a story in the Times of India about an engineering student selling a name to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Tip of the cap to AlokDomain
From the article:
Amal has ‘beaten’ the master at his own game and closed a deal with FB, trading the registration rights of maxchanzuckerberg.org on Monday.
FB approached Augustine for the domain name registered by him as it was the short form of Maxime Chan Zuckerberg, the name of FB founder Mark Zuckerberg’s daughter.
More than the money, Augustine, a final-year electronics student from a city engineering college, says he was thrilled by the fact that FB approached him.
He says his passion for filing internet domain names has earned him a small profit. He received $700 in the deal with FB.
“I have registered quite a few domain names and I have been doing it for some time. I registered this domain name when their baby was born last December,” said Amal, a student of KMEA engineering college. However, the FB team’s approach foxed Amal. The request came as a casual email from GoDaddy, an internet domain registrar and web hosting company, asking whether he would be willing to sell the domain name by the end of last month and for how much.
He replied yes and asked for a decent sum of $700.
better would have been if he given it FREE…$700!!!
As far as Zuckerberg is concerned, $700 is effectively free, little more than chump change found down the back of the sofa, if that.
Several conflicting reports from a couple of days ago listed the domain as maxchanzuckerberg.com. The Indian press is quick to pick on sensationalist stories, some of which are inaccurate, such as the guy who supposedly registered Google.com “for a minute.” I would take this news with a large pinch of kosher salt.
In this case, Indian press clearly applauds an example of cybersquatting.
cybersquatting….UDRP are main obstacles for FREE INTERNET….it’s a DEMOCRACY
If he quoted higher price, he might have faced UDRP.
I don’t know why media highlights this kind of silly things – may be due to lack of awareness on “real domain investment success stories.”
With all the wrong Zuckerberg did as a student couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
This is a scummy story not to be celebrated at all…
Because you said so ? LOL
… because if this is considered any measure of success the person in the story, and anyone that follows in his example are going to learn some hard lessons about domain investing…
Agree 100%.
The opening statement about “beating [Zuckerberg] at his own game” is as wrong as it is misleading and absurd, since Zuckerberg’s “game” is accidentally falling into relatively modest piles of money considering how Facebook could have prospered – with or without a solid base of naive users – if run by someone who could at least pretend to care less about money than the users, the product, the Internet, or how Steve Case, with nothing more than anything he wanted – plus the collective indifference of 7 billion people – successfully transitioned from mailing AOL setup floppy disks to every address in the galaxy to condensing and selling his insanity on Amazon in the form of a real book with actual pages and a word count that allegedly remains a natural number even when skipping every use of “disrupt” to compensate for his wildly inaccurate portrayal of Reality (apparently, he claims they have been intimate; sources close to Reality told TMZ that Steve is “dreaming” and people are always assuming Reality is “happening to them”) – evidently this was forgiven by critics, however, as the book took top honors in the Mindless Optimism category, narrowly defeating Apostle John’s Revelation and every Sara McLaughlin song.
oh please… Business is business. If MZ was concerned about the name he would have got it long ago. It’s not cybersquatting!!! This is the kid not Mark Zuckerberg. The kid is not a celebrity type Mark is. Unless the name has been trademarked there’s nothing that can be done. Even then a trademark can still be registered by someone else as long as it’s not a conflicting business. I’ve seen a lot of people here yell “Cybersquatting” then they will turn around and do the same thing.
Targeting a specific brand or celebrity in this way is squatting, pure and simple. When such behavior is held up as an example of success, it exacerbates a problem by encouraging inexperienced domainers to register infringing domains, taking names hostage with no other purpose than to demand ransom money from a particular company or individual.
Ethics aside, that strategy seldom pays off and incurs risk of UDRP. Worst of all, it confuses the general public, who continue to lump legitimate domain investors with cyber squatters. Cases like this expose the rest of us to misunderstanding and hostility, making negotiations unnecessarily difficult and putting domains at increased risk of RDNH.
There is a difference between purchasing a domain name that multiple people might want and registering a domain in bad faith to extort money from 1 person. It doesn’t matter that Zuckerberg is rich. In fact, targeting celebrities’ children is bound to bring negative publicity to the domain industry. Let’s not applaud or excuse this.