The case dates back to January 2003 when Nominet discovered that its WHOIS database – which lists domain names and their owners – had been subjected to unauthorised data mining. The details of registrants were 'scraped' from Nominet's database and 50,000 registrants received misleading notices from an outfit calling itself “UK Internet Registry”.
The unsolicited notices resembled invoices and tried to sell .com names to the holders of .uk names.
At the time, Nominet warned its registrants to disregard the notices and began an investigation, which traced two Australian suspects, Chesley Rafferty and Bradley Norrish, and three of their companies – Diverse Internet Pty Ltd, Internet Payments Pty Ltd and Seychelles-based UK Internet Registry Ltd.
Nominet won its main court battle with the fraudsters in September, and has now managed to stop them moving their assets out of Australia or transferring them to third parties.
The next step in the case will be a hearing to determine the level of damages that the defendants must pay to Nominet for breaching its copyright in the WHOIS database.
Separately, Nominet has also announced a consultation on a proposed expansion of the domain name system from its existing core of 37 symbols.
At present, domain names are limited to letters of the alphabet, the 10 digits and hyphens. But this excludes accented letters and other character sets.
The registry is considering the adoption of a new technical approach known as Internationalising Domain Names in Applications, or IDNA, which could allow domain names with accents, with letters from other alphabets, or different writing systems, such as Chinese.
It seeks views on the degree to which Nominet should support IDNA and which letters and characters should be permitted.
Comments are invited by 6th September.
