Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/13/dropbox-acquires-the-domain-everyone-thought-it-had-dropbox-com/

by bigwill • 17 years ago

108 56 17 years ago

spicyj• 17 years ago

I don't know who this "everyone" is who thought they owned the domain. I certainly noticed before I signed up that they used a different domain.

That said, it's excellent that they get the domain that they deserve, which will undoubtedly increase traffic and profit for the company.

timdorr• 17 years ago

I'll admit that I fell for the wrong domain before.

panic• 17 years ago

It's worth mentioning that the first hit for "dropbox.com" on Google is the actual site, "getdropbox.com". Many people navigate to a site by googling its URL then clicking the first link.

eli2• 17 years ago

I doubt most people navigate that way. Sure, plenty of browsers will do a google search from the address bar but only if what you've typed doesn't resolve on its own.

blasdel2• 17 years ago

You'd be surprised how far normal users will go out of their way to avoid the address box, often using comically complex routines.

Google is much more trustworthy than DNS -- it's essentially content-addressed.

there• 17 years ago

here's a related story that i am reminded of: i had a customer complain that a survey form on their site was occasionally not working, according to their customers, which they learned by those customers filling out a feedback form on the company's site which then sent them an e-mail. this survey form was a special url that was printed on receipts they gave to customers.

after looking in the server logs and finding nothing strange that would explain why the survey is only occasionally not working (i still didn't have a concrete definition of what "not working" meant), i had the company talk to one of their customers to get more information. he forwarded me the feedback email generated from their website, which included the end user's ip, which i then looked in the logs for.

what i found was that the way the user got to the company's feedback page was by typing "www.theirdomain.com" into yahoo search, clicking on the first result, and then going to the feedback link from their site (the referrer of their initial visit was a search.yahoo.com query for the domain). only after typing "www.theirdomain.com/survey" into yahoo's search box, did i discover the root of the problem.

for whatever reason, yahoo wasn't returning any results for the specific "www.theirdomain.com/survey" query, despite the page being there for years and having proof of yahoo crawling the url many times in the logs. google would bring it up as the first result, as did every other search engine, but for some reason yahoo would just return a "couldn't find anything matching that" error, which the end user translated into "your company's survey page doesn't work". after telling the specific user to type the survey url into the box "at the top of the screen", it of course worked. every other customer complaining about the problem was doing the same thing, all because of yahoo.

lyime• 17 years ago

Yea you'd be surprised. When I look at Mugasha's organic traffic. The number keyword for search is Mugasha or mugasha.com.

tdm911• 17 years ago

I frequently see users type www.microsoft.com or similar into Google. I think people see Google as their address bar, as generally it's set as the home page.

Asking a user what the address in the address box/bar is often ends with a blank expression on their face!

pbhjpbhj• 17 years ago

If you thought it's easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html

dugmartin• 17 years ago

When I was at Britannica in the late 90s our #1 search term was "yahoo.com" and #2 was "sex".

staunch• 17 years ago

Like TheFacebook.com -> Facebook.com. Now we just have to wait for the $150+ million acquisition from HP or EMC.

vaksel• 17 years ago

so how much did you guys ended up paying(or was it free?)...or is this some huge corporate secret

ujjwalg• 17 years ago

It is unrelated to this post but, dropbox rocks. I have tried 4 different file sharing services but dropbox simplicity and efficiency beats them all.

kyro3• 17 years ago

Haha. You know, this must really be an amazing company. I have never used the product myself, but every time a post about Dropbox comes around, there are always at least a few comments of people just wanting to mention how much they love it, regardless of the actual submission topic.

lupin_sansei• 17 years ago

http://superuser.com/questions/4143/what-interesting-types-o...

elblanco• 17 years ago

It really is an amazing product.

peterlai• 17 years ago

At MIT's Startup Bootcamp, Kyle noted a similar squatter on http://justintv.com/.

vlad3• 17 years ago

If so, then News.com is very succesfully cybersquatting Hacker News, in the same way.

buugs• 17 years ago

I think this would be more like if someone else owned bitly.com and raised the price to 400,000 when everyone started using bit.ly

bjclark• 17 years ago

I thought google just bought dropbox.com? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=857101

mbrubeck• 17 years ago

The domain owner had set the DNS to point to the Google App Engine servers. Google was never directly involved.

eli2• 17 years ago

Sucks that it took lawyers, but good for them

terrellm• 17 years ago

It was still probably cheaper to get the lawyers involved than buying it on the open market or public auction.

greendestiny2• 17 years ago

Seems like the guy initially registered dropbox.com before anyone had heard of it, not sure I think its a great thing. Surely you just call your company something that you can get domain for. Well whatever really, I love dropbox and this guy was just leeching off them.

pingswept2• 17 years ago

I met Drew, one of the founders of Dropbox, a few years ago at Barcamp Boston. If I remember it right, he said that the initial dropbox.com owner was just some random dude who was planning on starting some sort of venture related to dropboxes, hadn't done it yet, but didn't want to sell. My impression was that he got the domain some time before Dropbox launched, and at least initially, he wasn't doing anything particularly irritating other than letting a short domain name languish (not that bad, in the big picture).

From the PDF in the link, it sounds like the original owner then transferred the domain to a third party, who then ran ads for Dropbox's competitors, leading to the legal wrangling.

blasdel2• 17 years ago

I was just noticing earlier today how clumsy a dl.getdropbox.com/u/00000/file URL looks

Feels weird being exhorted to "Get Dropbox" when I already using one...

mattmaroon2• 17 years ago

My offer to break that guy's knees from summer 2007 still stands.

slig3• 17 years ago

Why so much rage? The original owner registered the domain first.

note that I don't like squatters either, but who can tell that he wasn't legitimate when he registered it first?

dkersten• 17 years ago

Not to mention that he registered it in the 90's! How does that possibly count as squatting?

mattmaroon2• 17 years ago

It was a joke from our summer session. There was a lot of annoyance over the domain even then. I didn't expect many people to get it.

petercooper2• 17 years ago

You won't need to do that to screw up his life. The lawsuit is calling for $100k in damages minimum. If he's as poor as most of us here, that'll mess him up for a while.

anurag• 17 years ago

From the PDF:

"21. Plaintiff has expended considerable time and effort promoting and advertising Dropbox, using DROPBOX as its brand name. To date, Plaintiff has spent in excess of $1 million dollars marketing the DROPBOX brand."

They have $1.5m in funding (according to CrunchBase), and they've spent over a million dollars on marketing already? There has to be an interesting story in there somewhere.

harpastum• 17 years ago

Seems like a pretty large number, but remember, funding isn't dropbox's only source of income.

In addition, depending on the definition of 'marketing' (IANAL), the referral engine (i.e. free space for referring other users), might count as marketing the dropbox brand, and the 'value' of the free space would likely count as the amount customers would have to pay, not the cost to dropbox.

jpeterson• 17 years ago

So will dropbox.com redirect to getdropbox.com in perpetuity, or will you guys eventually migrate over to the new domain?

willwagner• 17 years ago

FWIW, I was trying to find out what the site looked like before this kerfuffle. I only found this:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://dropbox.com

which doesn't show too much except for some godaddy.com domain parking.

If it was just a domain parked while the guy was trying to figure out what he wanted to do with it, I'm not so excited about the outcome. If it was misleading site pretending to be getdropbox.com, then that's a whole other story.

There really needs to be a better system for domain name registration. I'm all for inexpensive domain names but perhaps there should be some sort of waiting list, and if people are on the waiting list, the renewal fees get raised by a set amount each year (perhaps capped at something like 25%) as long as there was a waiting list. Once the person doesn't renew, the first person on the waiting list gets it but they get charged at the new rate.

In that way, you couldn't just squat on a domain without doing something with it and eventually there would be a fair market price for it. If no one wanted it, the price for the domain would stay low.

There is probably still some gaming in a system like that but at least it would encourage more turnover of unused domains, which would be a good thing.

ars• 17 years ago

When I saw it (not long ago), it was a completely empty page with a google header.

xelfer• 17 years ago

The page with the google header is what I saw 2 days ago.

vlad3• 17 years ago

First, Dropbox has not commented on why Dropbox.com redirects to them, nor about their lawsuit of the domain owner. Therefore, this is a horrible news article, with an assumption that Dropbox holds an new ownership stake in the domain.

Second, it's actually quite possible Dropbox asked the .com holders to forward traffic to the real site in order for both parties to value the domain's contribution to downloads/upsales from type-in traffic (is it 90% new users? Or almost always those who have an account?). This would mean TechCrunch hurts Dropbox by increasing their cost to buy/license the domain.

Third, we can't tell who owns the domain, so it could still be the same party! The .com could forward to the real site for just one day to tease Dropbox by sending it visitors for just one day. This also means they could point to the real site for a month, then a competitor later on after links start rolling in.

Finally, I don't think this owner, nor Justintv.com, are cybersquatters since they owned their domains since the 90's.

dzohrob• 17 years ago

Evenflow owns dropbox.com now. Check http://whois.sc/dropbox.com .

vlad3• 17 years ago

Yes, looks like the .com turned off Whois privacy, and Dropbox does own it now (most Whois services still point to Domains by Proxy, including when I checked). But since Dropbox didn't have a comment for TechCrunch on why the domain pointed to the real site while it was still privacy-protected, the headline of the article didn't make sense.

invisible2• 17 years ago

I would say putting ads and turning a profit by advertising competitors of the brand your domain is mimicking would be considered squatting a domain.

slig3• 17 years ago

It's the price you have to pay for choosing a brand name whose .com you don't own/can't buy.

furriner• 17 years ago

I wonder if this service is only available to US companies? If my foreign company registers a trademark in my own country then finds a website that was registered 9years ago will the US court force them to hand over the .com domain?

lutorm2• 17 years ago

I think the key is the trademark confusion part. If you have a domain name that was registered a long time ago and then realize that it's a name for some successful business and then start to use your domain name for something related, then you are guilty of trademark infringement. If on the other hand you've been running a business since before the other one started, then it's they who are guilty of infringement. If you own ibm.com for your business "Indiana Boomerang Manufacturing, Inc.", IBM can't really push the trademark infringement allegation because the risk of confusion is small. That's at least my understanding of how trademarks work.

Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com

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