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

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).

It’s a CONSPIRACY! Canadian registrant “sues” pretty much everybody

Canadian domain registrant and noted industry troll Graham Schreiber has sued, or at least claims to have sued, just about every notable figure in the ICANN community.

A document purporting to be a lawsuit is being circulated today among some of the dozens of named defendants, which include several people who’ve not been involved with ICANN for many years.

It names 27 volunteers from ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency, 21 current and former senior executives of registries and registrars, several members of the US and UK governments, an FBI agent, an unnamed “White House Conspirator”, as well as lawyers for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, ICANN, Google and the UK Intellectual Property Office.

It’s my job to tell you in simple terms what the alleged lawsuit alleges, but I’m afraid I’m at an utter loss with this one. It reads like the fever dream of a conspiracy theorist that would make the average Qanon believer appear the model of reason and clarity.

Schreiber variously refers to his defendants as “Kingpins” involved in a “Cartel” or “Conspiracy”, the factual details of which he never quite gets to.

Here’s a representative sample paragraph, unedited:

If and when, the “Defensive Registrations” obliged by ICANN’s R[r]egistry & R[r]egistrar “Stakeholders” = “Kingpins” and specifically CentralNic [ weren’t purchased ] assailants would strike; and Infringe, Dilute, Blur and Pass-Off as our online business, individually with identical and confusingly similar domain name, faking to be appointed or an authorized agent of the primary Registrant, in a country’s entrepreneurs Intellectual Property may or may not have been protectable at Common Law Trademark, under Madrid Protocol Rules, as it / they fulfilled the obligations of local National laws, to become a Registered Trademark, as I secured in the USA with USPTO, after the CIPO did their work.

At one point, he admits to trolling the defendants on social media since 2012, and points to their failure to sue him as evidence of a conspiracy:

I’ve made statements via those Social Media resources which would, if they were untrue, subject me to a singular lawsuit or multiple lawsuits from the Defendants listed, for: Defamation, Slander and Libel.

As yet, these well taunted Defendants have all conspired together, in collective silence, anticipating that their grandeur and my insignificance would, maintain safe passage, for them to continue.

As the vast majority of the Defendants are well schooled, powerful U.S. Attorneys, it’s my expectation that the Court oblige them to address the charges here stated, or collectively for their defence, they must File a lawsuit with this Court, charging me for what could be [ but aren’t ] remarks constituting Defamation, Slander & Libel against them, which again, I’ve posted on some of the Defendants own clients, Social Media Platforms

Schreiber was once a regular fixture in DI’s comments section too. Thankfully, we’ve not heard from him in years.

The root cause of the “lawsuit” appears to be an old beef Schreiber has with CentralNic.

He says he owns what he calls a “common law trademark” on the term “Landcruise” and he once used the matching .com domain to operate a motor-home rental business.

At some point in 2011, he became aware that a British registrant had registered landcruise.co.uk and landcruise.uk.com.

At the time, CentralNic was primarily in the business of selling domains at the third level in pseudo-gTLDs such as uk.com, gb.com and us.com.

Schreiber tried and failed (twice) to get the .uk domain transferred under Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service, and then he took his beef to the courts.

In 2012, he sued CentralNic, ICANN, Verisign, eNom, and Network Solutions in a complaint that barely made much more sense than the “lawsuit” being circulated today.

That case was thrown out of court in 2013.

I expect the same fate to befall the current lawsuit, if indeed it has even been filed in a court.

Schreiber wants $5 million from every defendant.

If you want to check whether you’re one of them, read the PDF “complaint” here.