This is going to seem like a strange question but I've never actually dealt with this with any of my clients before and I'm not sure how to go about it.

My client has been paying for a pair of domain names for nearly 2 years now through a Tucows reseller; however, the person listed as the Registrant and Admin contact isn't my client; it was actually the person who originally designed the site. Tucows has been absolutely no help at all in this matter and the reseller of the domain name hasn't been either. My question is: how do I go about getting the domain name back for my client so that he's the legal owner of it and any correspondence related to it is sent to him?

He's stuck, unless he has documentation to clearly show he asked the designer to register the domains in his name or purchase them on his behalf, or whatever. If he has, he can get his lawyer to contact the designer and request nicely (as lawyers do) that the designer gets the ownership transferred pronto. I'm assuming that the customer and designer have parted company and that customer has already asked the designer to transfer the ownership. It isn't really OpenSRS's problem.

My advice would be to put it down to experience and get some new domains registered (in the customers name!) asap. Unless the domain names are absolutely must-have it isn't worth the hassle and cost.

That's about what I figured. I've half-suggested to him to get a .ca domain (since we're in Canada) but he's still convinced that somehow between his current (soon to be ex) host and ex designer they're going to give him the info. Unfortunately, what I can't really communicate to him yet is that these guys have been playing this game with him and their other customers for quite some time and getting away with it. Sooner or later, they're going to have to create legislation, be it international, national, provincial/statewide/regional, or local, that will deal with this sort of thing. It's just insane.

So what legislation would you ask for that is not already in place?

The domain name is not registered in your client's name. As far as anyone is concerned, it's not his.

It's no different than if I bought a car for you, and you let me keep the car in my name. When it came time to sell the car, I would be able to do so and you would not.

If a crime has been committed with regards to the domain registration, then surely your client has a receipt that says he owns the domain name... doesn't he?

What is OpenSRS supposed to do? Give your client the domain name because he says it's his?

Again, what additional laws need to exist to handle this? If your client has been defrauded, certainly enough laws exist to handle this now.

-t

I'm going to make one very large assumption here, and that's that you are US-based. Because in America, you're probably absolutely correct.

In Canada, however? Whole different ballgame. Our laws are so perverse and twisted sometimes that things such as this can go on and absolutely nothing will be done about it. Coupled with this is our nation's relative lack of speed in accepting the Internet as anything more than an experimental playground where the vast majority of sites are little more than 5-to-10 page company brochures. The laws in this country reflect this (in fact, one town in Ontario even goes so far as to not allow anything beyond a 56K connection!)

And as far as what OpenSRS should do about things of this nature, they can and should get involved. While I don't agree that they should hand over the domain name just because someone says it belongs to them, I do believe they should take on more of a role to investigate issues of this nature. Proof of legal ownership and intellectual property rights in these issues would be fairly easy to obtain. Vendor permits, business licences and trademarks would establish intellectual right to a domain (I believe, although I've never gone through the process yet, they do this for .biz domains) and proof of payment could, like you said, be demonstrated with invoices. So yes, they can and should get involved and their attitude with regard to this issue is rather poor from a customer service standpoint. I do realize that there is an additional cost for the "ombudsman" service that this provides, but it would nevertheless keep the hassle from such an issue to a relative minimum.

With regard to your "car" analogy, there is one fundamental difference that goes on when someone purchases a car as a gift for another and when someone purchases a domain name. When someone purchases a car as a gift for another, he/she is generally aware of the car purchase, and will fill out the paperwork accordingly. I don't know how this works in Ontario, but there is also a form that has to be filled out when a car is being given as a gift to indicate the transfer isn't subject to sales tax. So the buyer of the car is fully aware of the nature of the purchase.

When someone purchases a domain name for business use, he/she is generally purchasing it for his/her own business use, not someone else's. And while it can be argued that the client should have paid more attention to this issue, most people wouldn't know how to pay attention to such an issue and would expect that whoever actually filled out the paperwork wouldn't take control of something that didn't belong to them. In this case, it's more like if you were buying a car and, because the salesman filled out the paperwork, the car still belonged to the salesman. There should be a certain level of accountability for everyone, including OpenSRS.

We will simply have to agree to disagree on this one.

I don't see where OpenSRS has any culpability here, and I certainly would not expect them to verify that the person claiming to own the domain actually does if he is not listed as the owner.

As for the person purchasing the domain not knowing that the domain should have been registered in his name - I also don't accept ignorance as an excuse for lack of vigilance when it comes to any property purchased - be it an automobile or a domain name.

I would not assume that if I gave you $20k and asked you to purchase a car for me that you would put the title in my name - I would verify this. The fact that this client did not do the same with a domain name is no one's fault but his own.

You can side with the client and believe that he has been screwed in a business transaction and I don't think anyone will disagree with you - however there is certainly no way to put the domain registrar on the hook for sorting this out.

-t

I went thru this a while back with a customer of mine. TuCows and openSrS were not to blame there - I ended up getting my customers domain thru www.SnapNames.com. The site's down time was over a month - but at least he got his domain back.

www.expirefish.com now does the same thing for cheeper, but I'v yet to try them out

my advice is to stay completely away from expirefish.com and registerfly.com
they have absolutely zero customer service, you will never get an email answered, unless you resort to complaining to their parent company.
ok, even if you could put up with the non-existant customer service, they seem to have a habit of double billing you. They have done this to me twice so far, and the second time, they will not respond to my emails. I have read of them double billing other people, and I bet there are people out there who may not be checking their bank statements carefully and finding themselves being ripped off.

As to godaddy.com, I just realised i have been billed for a domain name that I just wanted to let lapse, so needless to say, the few domain names that I have left with them, I will be transferring out.

Well I meet with the guy tomorrow, so I think what I'm going to do is recommend that he register a .ca domain name and/or use the snapnames service to grab the corresponding .com when it expires in December. Thanks for the suggestion. At least now I've got something to go with for the guy.