I am often asked why I registered Harrods.com and some other domain names, so I figured I would actually write something briefly to explain it. First off, in the Harrods case, it says "50 domain names" - In actual fact there were probably about 15 or 20 at most. It's interesting that the same lawyers who said "50" in the Harrods case prosecuted the "BAA" case, and they said "15" in there, I think. -- So, how did it happen then? Weeeel... When the Internet started in the UK, nobody knew what it was and commercially, nobody wanted it... Unfortunately, I tend to do these things a tad ahead of their time and I happened to run a web design company. Of course, marketing was a nightmare, because nobody knew nor cared what the Internet was. I talkign to Renault UK for ages trying to get them to run a web campaign for the Clio but they really didn't understand the concept. In the end, we registered clio.com and knocked up a site to show them what could be done. They eventually said they weren't interested in The Internet, and that Renault would never be interested in it nor would they be using it. So I had a web design company, with no business, and the only way we could think of marketing the Internet was to knock up sites, and try and market the idea and concept based on that. We picked around 20 target customers and registered a domain name that they could use, Harrods was one... The point of registering the name, is that we would probably end up spend a year talking them into the idea that they wanted a web site, we'd be telling them "And you could call it harrods.com" and, when they finally came along and said "yea, we'll buy it, we like this!" we'd look pretty stupid if someone else had registered harrods.com and we had to name it something else. -- Did you ever try to extort money, or sell a site? I didn't, no... I had some business partners whos lawyers made a very bad job in dealing with some domain names they had and they were also dealing with some of my domain names. They did sell one for a couple of thousand pounds (one that these days would sell for millions) but I never got any money from that. Most of the "company based" domain names I had I simply let expire and left them for other people to register, since the companies had all said they weren't interested and didn't want to be on the net (believe it or not this was common back then) and the ones that did seem interested, I simply transferred. Richer Sounds, I went to quite some lengths to make sure got their own name, despite being told by my own lawyers that I wasn't allowed to be seen to be helping them with the Harrods case going on, I didn't however try and get any publicity out of it. (It should be noted that Julian Richer sent me a bag of lollypops nearly 10 years before this, so I figured I owed them a favour). I have been accused of "trying to extort money" a number of times, but only ever by Herbert Smith (the lawyers for Harrods and BAA PLC). I have written to them and asked straight up that if they believe this I would be willing to go through with a criminal trial (exortion being a criminal offence), but hardly suprisingly, they have never taken me up on that (despite it being my right under the ECHR, ah well who says the law is fair, hey?). -- Views on other "domain speculators"? Not very high really! - When I worked for BT, I was involved in a number of cases of people registering BT based names and trying to sell them to us. This was clearly a case of someone registering a domain name with the sole purpose of ripping off a valid trademark or business owner. I don't agree with this, I wouldn't like someone to do it to me, and I think there should be laws against it. I don't, however think these laws should be used to blanket cover everything, and especially in the case of BAA vs. baa.com there was no trademark violation, and big companies using their might to destroy smaller ones whilst not illegal, is certainly dodgy and I would hate to think that good case law I was helping to set for big companies was being used to shaft people. One of the ultimate ironies of the BAA PLC vs. baa.com case was that the main case quoted against me was "BT vs. One in a Million vs" - A case that I did work on BT's side for and was publically quoted as being very against One in a Million. People who registered things like "business.com" and made millions? Well good for them, I just wish I had done it. I did have some good domain names in my past (cinemas.com, bookmakers.com and a few similar) but they were stolen off me by people forging change requests to Network Solutions and reregistering the domains in their own name. In those days, there was no auditing on this sort of thing, and if a domain name is worth hundreds of thousands, how much does it cost to bribe a member of staff there to "accidentally" lose a name so that it can be re-registered? - I am not happy about this, I suspect I lost a lot of money that I would have had, if I'd been in the domain name business but there's nothing I can do now I doubt.