Taken Over by Porn – ABC News

Porn Purveyors Grab Expiring Web Sites From Previous Owners

Dec. 17 — You won't find any Bible scripture on the Brooklyn diocese website. Instead, visitors will get links to plenty of skin from a pornography operator in Europe. 

We were shocked," said Carole Martin, webmaster for the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York.

According to Martin, the pornographer picked up the parish's domain name after it expired earlier this year. The parish didn't find out about the switch until visitors who had bookmarked the old site found links to various adult entertainment websites.

"We found out there was nothing we could do," Martin said. "They had legitimately bought our old domain name and while we tried to contact them to see if we could get it back, figuring they would be very nice about it, they informed us they wanted $1,500."

Entertainment of a Different Sort

When patrons logged on to the Ballet Theatre of Maryland website to buy "Nutcracker" tickets they got performances of a rather unwholesome variety.

"It's sad that a business would do this kind of thing," said Henry Holtz, the ballet's executive director.

An old domain of the Ballet Theatre of Maryland was bought by a pornographer just after it expired. On its website, the pornographer let the company know it could buy the domain back for $500.

"We are not willing to do that," Holtz said.

Growing Trend

These websites are not alone. Domain registries such as Network solutions do not track the number of cyber speculators who are taking over domains as soon as they expire.

Internet filtering software maker N2H2 of Seattle claims these domain grabs are on the increase, saying the trend began roughly a year ago. It says operators of overseas gambling and adult websites are picking up the domains of hundreds of websites every day.

"I've seen one is in Armenia and another is in Russia," said David Burt, public relations director of N2H2. "They are registering domain names that aren't trademarked legally and it looks like there really isn't much that can be done about it."

Domains of websites that aren't trademarked are harder to reclaim in court. Often these are websites of religious and civic groups, local governments, and non-profit organizations that can't afford to buy back their names.

"I think they took our site because it had over 500 links attached to it," Martin said. "We had it up for three-and-a-half years and there were links attached to it from all over the world."

Speculators look for websites with lots of links attached to the domain name so it scores high in search engines such as Google.

"If you go to a search engine such as Google or AltaVista where you can do a search with a link, you can look and see how many sites are linked to a particular site," Burt said. "You can see hundreds of sites still linking to these pornography sites, because they haven't changed, they haven't found out about it yet."

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