Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

Conspiracy nut ordered to pay thousands to “kingpins” as “cartel” lawsuit chucked out

Kevin Murphy, February 19, 2021, 12:34:09 (UTC), Domain Policy

Domain industry conspiracy theorist Graham Schreiber has been ordered to pay CAD 6,000 ($4,750) in legal fees to many of the scores of industry figures he sued as a “cartel” of “kingpins” last August.

A Canadian Federal Court judge last month threw out his rambling, incoherent complaint in its entirety, saying among other things that it was “frivolous and vexatious”, containing no allegations the defendants were capable of responding to.

Judge Angela Furlanetto summarized the case like this:

It can best be described as a wide-spread attempt by the Plaintiff to express his displeasure and frustration with his experience in his prior lawsuit in the U.S. and with the domain name system.

And:

In this case, the Plaintiff baldly asserts conspiracy, racketeering, trafficking, extortion, passing off and perjury. The Plaintiff raises these issues broadly, does not plead material facts to support the constituent elements of these causes of action, and has not identified with any clarity which defendants are asserted to have committed each of these acts and how. The who, when, where, how and what are not pleaded

In throwing out the case, she ordered that Schreiber must pay CAD 1,500 ($1,189) to each of the four sets of defendants who had responded to his complaint, to cover their legal fees.

Schreiber actually got lucky — the defendants had asked for a total closer to CAD 25,000 ($20,000), but the judge took pity on him because he was representing himself in the case.

The beneficiaries of these four payouts, should they ever be made, are GoDaddy VP James Bladel, a group comprising Jeff Ifrah, Keith Drazek, Timothy Hyland, Phil Corwin and David Deitch, Greenberg Traurig lawyers Marc Trachtenberg, David Barger, Amanda Katzenstein, Paul McGrady and Ian Ballon, and Facebook Canada.

But the suit had named dozens of other industry figures of greater or lesser prominence, in a crazy blanket rant that appears to be rooted in an old beef Schreiber has with CentralNic and Nominet related to the domain names landcruise.uk.com and landcruise.co.uk.

One of his rather bold legal gambits was to inform the court that he’d been trolling the defendants on social media for years, and that the fact he had not yet been sued for libel was evidence of a conspiracy.

Will a six grand legal bill be sufficient to get him to sit down and shut up? I guess time will tell.

Hat tip to erstwhile defendant John Berryhill for posting the ruling (pdf).

Tagged: ,

Add Your Comment