You may have to renew it yourself, then wait a month or two - most registrars won’t let you transfer domains within a certain time of the renewal date (usually about 30 or 60 days either side). This always annoys me, because the only time I tend to think about transferring domains is when they’re up for renewal, and thus stuck where they are for at least a month. The alternative is letting it expire, then letting these other people register it anew, but that means it’ll be unusable for quite a while, and stands a chance of being snaffled by someone else.
I just wanted to point out a really classy way to deal with this phenomenon.
Author (and Doper) Eve Golden has a website of her own, evegolden.com, in which she supplies a link to her “evil twin”, Eve Golden the MD in psychatry, at eve-golden.net. The other Eve does the same.
It would show class if both Happy Rhodes’s did the same, and it would generate more traffic for both or them.
How do you know he’s not using his domain? You know, the Web is only one part of the Internet. I have some domains that I use for email, another I use for FTP. Just because there’s no web site at a particular domain doesn’t mean it’s not being used.
Thought you might be interested to know that i emailed the guy and asked him what happened in his fight with Dell.
He said that there were nine separate hearings into the matter, each of which cost him 2,000 Euros. After the last one, his lawyer called him saying that Dell were offering him €3,000 for the name. He thought that was a joke, but then his lawyer advised him to take it because, even if he won the case Dell would appeal and continue draining his funds and his energy. He just gave up.
This is precisely the sort of shit that should never be allowed to happen in these cases.
Interesting! Thanks for following up. 
[Self-promotion] When we were painting our giant LOLcat[/S-p], we asked the building owner what the hell was up with asians_com, which was painted near the top of our surface. He said he painted that on the sides of all his buildings to make it more visible and therefore more valuable. He said he was holding out for a quarter million dollars, and has been for something like 10, 15 years.
We wished him luck with that endeavor.
Well I read the whole thread and I can’t find any mention of an offer to the guy. 
The artist herself isn’t bothered…
‘She herself isn’t concerned much. She’s not an internet person and though she of course knows what’s going on, it’s NOT a big deal for her. She likes her current domain name just fine’
…and when the site went up on ebay, nobody bid on it.
'He even put the domain name up on ebay once. Fans, knowing, understanding and having no problem with the fact that that he was using the domain at the time, never checked his site, so none of us knew about the sale. ’
So Equipoise, have you offered to buy the site?
A guy here in Maryland bought the domain pizza.com back in the early days of the internet, and recently put it up for auction, where it received a top bid of $2.6 million. Talk around the domain name community, however, is that the deal has not actually gone through yet, and plenty of people are wondering whether it was a serious bid or just someone playing around.
The domain name auctioneer, Sedo, which handled the pizza-com auction, has something of a reputation for allowing anyone to bid, and not closing the accounts of fake bidders. In response to a bunch of criticism, Sedo recently introduced an authentication system for people who want to bid on high-priced domain names.
Some of you need desperately to take a minute for a fucking reality check.
So if someone buys a piece of land and doesn’t develop it… or a car and puts it in a garage… or a painting and doesn’t hang it up… or whatever, then that person is not only a selfish asshole but the thing he/she bought rightfully belongs to you?
I own a bunch of domain names. Some I developed into web sites for various purposes. Some I may develop if I choose to get around to it as a priority over other things going on in my life. And, yes, sometimes I have sold domain names to other people when I was contacted by someone who understood and appreciated that giving up my rights to something I paid for is something they would need to pay for to make it worth my while. None of you fucktards complaining here has any rights to the names I own. It’s not like I bought any that would be misleading to people so they think they’d get some one else. I don’t put porn up on any of the sites. I’m just someone who was smart enough to see an opportunity, spent a lot of time figuring out the best strategies to get the names that might be useful in the future, and paid the money up front AND every year when the names come up for renewal. That’s how the system works, that’s how it’s supposed to work, and if you’re going to complain about people abusing the system please kindly get your head out of your ass to recognize the difference between people who are actually abusive and those who choose to do something other than what you want with their own god damned property.
Now IF you’re some proponent of communism or something who would just as agressively claim that someone who has a collection of mint vinyl records of your favorite band packed away that they are greedy, amoral assholes for not giving them to you to listen to, well, then at least you’d be consistent in your wrong-headedness. But most of the clueless people here (as compared to the ones who had the sense to realize there’s nothing wrong with what the domain owner mentioned in the original post is doing) just don’t seem to understand that you can’t just make up stupid fucking nonsense rules in your own head and only apply them in the situations where you can whine about something and not apply them everywhere else.
You’re not buying a piece of land. Nobody owned it, valued it, and sold it to you.
Squatters are going through uncharted territory (from the comfort of their grandmother’s basements) and putting flags up to claim ownership of land that they think might be worth something to someone in the future. Then, when someone actually wants to be a productive member of society, and comes across that land all on their own, ready to put it to good use, they have to pay a toll to the squatter.
The squatter hasn’t created anything, hasn’t developed the land into something worthwhile, he’s just asserted ownership over it for the express purpose of squeezing dough from someone who wants to use it.
Thanks for the tip. I just found out what happens when you let a domain expire, because it just happened to me and now I have to jump through some hoops to get it back. Over the past few years I’ve had accounts with SimpleHost, StartLogic, PowWeb and Dreamhost, and got a free domain names when signing up with each of them. I then decided to consolidate everything into one of them and closed all the other accounts, but they still have my domains. I changed the DNS settings but what I didn’t know is that if you no longer have an account they don’t send you an email warning you that your domain is about to expire. Sure enough, I checked a web site and it was down, because the domain had expired May 16. Argh. Thank goodness for grace periods, but now I have to fax a letter to the ISP with all my credit card info, authorizing them to charge my card for the domain name renewal. Once all that’s taken care of, I’m going to transfer the registrar. It’s not enough to consolidate all of my various accounts, I need to consolidate my domain names under one registrar too.
So yeah, I’m just going to go ahead and renew so the Italian goth band won’t have to go through hoops to get the name, and so no one else can snatch up the name. Hell, at my current ISP I have God’s own space and bandwidth, so I might just offer to host their web site (for free, of course, I’m not interested in making money off an indie band).
She would do that, if he’d actually put up a site.
I thought it was clear. Yes, at least one other fan, and possibly more, offered to buy the domain name.
Did you even read what you quoted?
How could anyone have bid on the ebay sale when no one knew about it? We’re not psychic with some special fan voodoo to know when someone’s selling something regarding her. I would have bid. Others would have bid. SHE would have bid, if we’d known about it. No one knew about the ebay sale until a couple of years later, when I was checking archive.org to see when his site went down.
No. If it expired I’d buy it just as I have org and net, but I haven’t and would not contact him directly.
So then you definitely have no right to complain and this thread is looking more and more like your crazy Happy Rhodes-inspired rage.
I have no rage, never did. I pitted a guy in mild frustration for something that mildly frustrated me, then realized that I was in the wrong, which I’ve indicated in at least 2 posts. 3 including the one saying that I would not contact him directly (because, get it, I would be in the wrong to do so).
Wait…quoting myself from the OP:
Granted, that sounds like “rage” but it was definitely more frustration than rage. I posted that immediately after I saw that the domain had been renewed for another year. If I’d waited I would have done what I’d always done, sighed and thought to myself “maybe next year” and wouldn’t have posted. My bad for letting something that frustrated me prompt me to Pit. Please let me learn the lesson to keep my frustrations to myself.
You are absolutely right that I definitely have no right to complain. I have learned that lesson.
It’s a bastard, isn’t it? I had a company I registered my main domain with go bust, which meant that I was stuck unable to renew, and unable to access the registered admin address (because it was so old that the company hosting that had gone under, but I couldn’t change the registry entry because the registrar was bust). I ended up emailing photographs of payslips to some dude in the States to prove I was living at a particular address when the site was registered. Praise be to “Martin” at dotregistrar.com for taking pity on me.
I don’t think you’d be wrong to do so at all. I think you’d be fully within your rights to call or write and say “I represent a group of fans of the other artist known as HR and we would like to know if you would be willing to sell the domain name. If you were interested, could you please let me know what amount you would sell it for? I could then try to raise funds to purchase it.” I mean, it’s like any other asset; there’s no value judgment in inquiring if it is for sale or not. The worst he can do is say NO, right? All I would recommend is that you leave out your opinion that he’s a big ol’ meanie. 
You have every right to complain, as I’m sure you know. Everyone may not agree with you, but the Pit is a dandy place for bitching; don’t let the lack of universal agreement deter you because there’s never universal agreement on anything around here.
I can’t see why initial purchase costs for the “squatter” are of any relevance. It’s no different, in my mind, to land speculation. In both cases, people are taking ownership of a piece of property in order to gamble on making a profit from somebody who needs it—the only difference between the two is that entry costs into the “game” are a lot lower for domain name squatters.
However, I recognise that legal opinion differs.
It’s not so much a cost issue, as a difference in the landscape. With land speculation today, the land one wishes to buy already has an owner, and the speculator is fairly compensating the current owner in return for the potential upside of a future sale. Totally cool concept.
With domain names, it’s more like an uncharted wilderness, nobody owns any of the land, and speculators are staking off parcels for a nominal charge. Because of the vastness of the space, and the rate folks need parcels, there cannot be an auction type of sale for each parcel, nominal fees are the only way to exert any control over the process. Squatters are not staking off the parcels to use them, they stake them off to become a toll for people who wish to use this virgin territory for their business.
The squatters don’t improve the land, they only work to maintain their claim, and hope a rich business man happens upon the location and decides it’s a great place to set up shop. At that point, the business man discovers that there is a prior claim, and has to pay the squatter. The squatter didn’t even go so far as help the man find the location, he has to find it all on his own, only then can he even discover the prior claim.
The squatter does nothing to help the businessman be successful, he just represents an increased cost of doing business, with zero benefit to the business.