Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, could soon be the owner of a pornography site bearing his name for a mere US$35.
TransNames, the registered owner of the domain name bertieahern.com is now offering to sell it back to the prime minister for the price of transferring the domain.
All this comes after Ahern ignored repeated earlier requests to buy back the name from TransNames for a substantial sum of money, prompting TransNames to say it would auction off the domain instead.
Bertieahern.com was being auctioned as part of a package that included thetaoiseach.com, (taoiseach is the Irish word for prime minister), marymcaleesesucks.com (McAleese is the president of Ireland), and bertieahernsucks.com.
Attempts to sell the site to the highest bidder yielded a lot of interest along with a final bidder claiming to be Bertie Ahern, who eventually reneged on the $5 million bid.
For several weeks, TransNames ran angry messages on its site threatening to sue the individual who backed out -- for fraud.
Ironically, it is the person allegedly behind TransNames.com who has himself been sued for fraud several times in the past.
Simon Kapenda, a Namibian immigrant living in Ohio, was prosecuted by the Ohio state attorney general's office on fraud charges over a scholarship website last year. He was also sued by online medical giant Healtheon in a domain name dispute. Both cases were settled without Kapenda acknowledging wrongdoing.
In both court filings Kapenda is identified as the director of Trotwood, Ohio-based Kapenda Corp. and Kapenda Network, which are both listed as the registrants of TransNames.com.
However, the person who responded at TransNames.com's contact address -- simonkap@aol.com -- denied that TransNames had any association with Simon Kapenda or Kapenda Corp.
Kapenda can be linked to TransNames.com because he used the same unique identifying number, KS5838, to register TransNames.com, Kapenda.com, and all the domain names being sold on the TransNames site.
The unique identifier is known in Internet jargon as a "handle," and is used by an individual as a form of shorthand for registering multiple domain names. While a domain name registrant can give false name and address information for a given domain, a handle is a direct link to the individual who applied for a domain name.
Healtheon attorneys described Kapenda as a classic cybersquatter who registers domain names that are close to trademark names and tries to get the trademark owners to buy them back.
Kapenda was sued by Healtheon, the online health company created by Netscape founder Jim Clark, which uses the domain name WebMD.com. The lawsuit charged Kapenda with registering the names Usawebmd.com, Ukwebmd.com, and Iwebmd.com and trying to sell them back to WebMD. The case was settled May 17 when the judge dismissed the action following Kapenda's agreement to transfer the names over to WebMD.
TransNames.com has also registered and tried to sell the controversial domain names ColumbineHighSchool.com and Niggers.org.
TransNames is also offering to sell the Columbine High School domain name back to the school and give niggers.org to the NAACP civil rights organization if they agree to pay the transfer fees.
Kapenda was the subject of a New York Times article in November 1998, which reported that his company, World Education Access, had failed to pay tuition fees to several students, many of them from Africa. The students had responded to a scholarship program offered on the WEA website and created by Kapenda.
According to court documents, Kapenda charged students a registration fee of $799 to $999, and then a quarterly fee of $150 to $225 in order to have their tuition paid by WEA.
In January 1999, the Ohio state attorney general sued Kapenda on the grounds of running a fraudulent scholarship program. The case received a "consent judgement" in August last year, in which Kapenda did not acknowledge wrongdoing but agreed to pay restitution -- a total of $41,261 -- to 40 students.
According to a spokeswoman for the Ohio attorney general's office, he sends monthly checks of about $200 and has to date paid only $4,000 of the total due to the students.
In its continuing saga with bertieahern.com, TransNames.com has taken down the pornography site and replaced it with a notice stating the company would give Ahern the four domain names if he would pay the transfer fees of $35 per name. The site now states that seven people claiming to be Bertie Ahern have applied for the domains.
According to a notice on the TransNames.com site, "TransNames.com is simply an opportunist(ic) capitalist. As such, TransNames.com was entertaining offers for the purchase of the domains...."
Cybersquatting on a person's name has been a nebulous area of Net law, if the name itself has not been copyrighted. But in the past two weeks, actress Julia Roberts won back the Internet domain right to her name in U.S. courts, and writer Jeanette Winterson received hers back in the British courts.
