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Sex.com Hijacker Appeals to the Supreme Court
May 2, 2003
In yet another odd twist to an even stranger case, Stephen Michael Cohen, who was convicted of stealing the Web site Sex.com and later went on the lam, is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case.
Cohen is fighting to overturn several lower court judgments, which found him guilty stealing the domain name Sex.com by fraudulent means and ordered him to pay $65 million in damages.
Experts don't expect the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the case, which so far has been rejected by two lower courts, one of which said said Cohen stashed illegal financial gains in secret offshore accounts.
Cohen admitted to forging documents that he said authorized the transfer of the Sex.com domain from Gary Kremen. Cohen said these documents were sent to Verisign
in an effort to have the company transfer the domain to him.
Cohen contends that he owned the trademark to Sex.com prior to Kremen's formal move to register the site; through a variety of admittedly fraudulent means, he then tried to maintain his control of the domain, which is reported to garner as much as a half million dollars a month by selling space on it to other pornographic Web sites.
But a court eventually told Cohen to hand the domain over to Kremen and to pay him $65 million in damages. Cohen appealed, and then failed to appear in court.
Kremen registered sex.com in 1994 through Network Solutions. At the time, Kremen was doing business as Online Classifieds, Inc.
After a period of a year while sex.com sat dormant, Cohen, who previously served time in federal prison for bankruptcy fraud and impersonating an attorney, decided to commandeer the potentially lucrative domain name and forged a letter written on Online Classified letterhead to Network Solutions [now called VeriSign] requesting transference of ownership.
For a fee of $1,000, Networks Solutions processed the domain name conversion and sex.com officially became Cohen's property.
According to reports, Cohen then launched an Internet pornography business based on the sex.com domain name, but by the time Kremen was aware of the theft, Network Solutions refused to change the registration back without a court order.
More details at: http://www.atnewyork.com/news/article.php/2200521
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