This was posted on the Buckley Surfers website. Makes for interesting reading:
http://www.geocities.com/buckleysurfers2003/websham.html
BOMBERS WEB SHAM EXPOSED
Exclusive Buckley Surfers Investigation
BY DRIVER
3 June 2003
By now most in the football world would be aware of the AFL investigation into the arrangement between Essendon and its two star players, James Hird and Matthew Lloyd, over the ownership of internet site rights.
Despite many in the football world viewing this arrangement as an ingenious way of quarantining these payments outside the AFL salary cap for player payments, the Essendon Football Club has consistently maintained that they engaged in a commercial transaction in purchasing an asset from these players.
As often here at BUCKLEY SURFERS, rather than sit back and listen to the various parties spin their stories through selective media leaks I decided to take Essendon's claims and put them under the microscope. It did not take me too long to discover that if this was a commercial transaction then the people running the Essendon Football Club must be some of the world's most incompetent business people of all time!
All web domain names need to be registered and ownership of such name lies with the registered owner. This is very similar to way the land ownership system operates in Victoria and it is imperative to protect your interests that you register your internet domain name and keep the registration up to date.
The register of domain names is a searchable register so that any person can determine who owns a particular site. This provides some limited protection against anonymous websites defaming people or otherwise interfering with their legal rights. Importantly it also provides an appropriate marketplace for the sale of domain name and the rights to use such domain names.
So in order to determine who owned the rights to the web names that Essendon are claiming it purchased in good faith and on a commercial basis I conducted a search of the domain register to discover exactly who was kidding who in this whole sorry saga. Here are the results.
mattylloyd.com
It is claimed in reports that the name Essendon purchased off Matthew Lloyd for a purported $50,000 was the domain name mattylloyd.com. A quick check to see what was on that site reveals that the site does not even exist. Further investigations then revealed that the site mattylloyd.com has never been registered as a domain name.
In fact, as late as last night all I had to do was provide my credit card details to any number of domain name resellers and website hosts and I could be the proud owner of this site. Of course I am not a cyber-squatter so I did not partake of this wonderful opportunity to purchase - for a few dollars - the ownership of a web name that supposedly is worth $50,000 on Essendon's commercial valuation.
Of course if Essendon had any interest at all in actually owning this domain name they would have registered the name immediately they "bought" it off Matthew Lloyd. Even more importantly from a legal point o view, Lloyd would not be able to sell to Essendon what he did not actually own, so he or his managers would have registered this name before they sold it to Essendon and would then have negotiated the sale and then arranged for the update of the register to reflect the new ownership status.
None of this has happened. None of the steps to make this a commercial transactioon on the name mattylloyd.com have been put into place by either Lloyd or Essendon. To ensure that there was no confusion over which names had been involved in this deal, I did a search for similar names to find the following:
* matthewlloyd.com is a registered to a Mr Joel Taylor from Domain Source Inc, located in Aptos, California. Feel free to click on the link to see what that site contains - it is not offensive content but neither is it content that Essendon or Matthew Lloyd have created or have any interest in.
* mattylloyd.com.au is not registered with the Australia domain name rights issuer Melbourne IT and is also available for purchase today to anyone with a credit card.
* matthewlloyd.com.au is registered at Melbourne IT to "Matt Helloy Data" which is a business name registered in Victoria. The contact person for this domain name is a Paul Hogan who appears to be an employ or a principal of a computer training company. Without casting any aspersions to anyone the ownership of this site, complete with a strange business name registration, appears at first instance to be a classic cyber squatting exercise. There is no Matt Helloy Data listed in the Melbourne phone book, there is no person called Helloy listed in the phone records in Victoria and the website itself does not exist!
jameshird.com
I used the same steps to trace back the ownership of the jameshird.com domain name. This name has been registered through a website hosting company in America called godaddy.com and the registered owner of the domain name appears as Audrey Hughes. If you follow the link to jameshird.com you will see what pops up. Again this is someone who has bought the domain names rights hoping that someone else will come along and make them an offer. I don't know who Audrey Hughes is but again I note that after having paid $50,000 for the rights to the name I was expecting to see the name "Essendon Football Club" as the owner of this site.
A search of the Australian domain name registry finds that jameshird.com.au is also an unregistered domain name. Anyone with a credit card could buy this web name right now without having to pay $50,000 as Essendon supposedly did.
Now of course none of this is totally conclusive. Of course Essendon could argue that they entered into this arrangement in good faith and that they have every intention of registering the names but have not got around to it yet.
But this would be a complete sham. As I said earlier you cannot sell what you don't own and you can't buy from someone what they don't own. Neither Lloyd nor Hird owned these domain names and therefore could not sell them to Essendon in the first place. For Essendon to pay good members' money to buy these rights without checking the ownership of the site names is totally unbusinesslike and verging on negligent when the sums involved appear to total an amount on 6 figures.
The only other excuse that could possibly be offered is that Essendon did not actually pay for the rights to the domain names but simply for the rights to be the entitled to make the application to buy the domain name as a person properly entitled to do so. This is a technical legal argument to satisfy the provisions of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which is invested with power to solve domain name ownership disputes. However, this argument would be spurious because Essendon entered into this deal with Hird and Lloyd over 2 years ago. In that time you would think they would have moved to register the names if they had any real interest in owning them or, heaven forbid, actually operating these sites.
Recently both the Tasmanian and New Zealand governments failed in long and costly hearings at WIPO to win back rights to names being operated by others even though those governments insisted they were the rightful owners of the names but had failed to register them. In the case of New Zealand they had to pay $US500,000 to someone who was running a site they believed was injurious to their tourism industry. In Tasmania's case the site is being run by someone opposed to logging policies and no money will move that person to sell back the site to the government.
I, or anybody else, could buy mattylloyd.com or jameshird.com.au today and start running content on those sites that may not serve the best interests of Lloyd, Hird or Essendon. I wouldn't do that (I reserve the right to change my mind if they beat us again in round 22) but many others would jump at the chance either as an attack on players and club or as a perceived money making opportunity.
In short, Essendon claim to have bought certain internet rights as a commercial transaction off Lloyd and Hird. Lloyd and Hird did not own these rights in the first place so how did they have the right to sell them? Even if Essendon did pay good money to buy these rights why did they not register the names to protect their legal interests and why do they remain unregistered today? And why two years later do these supposedly valuable websites not even exist when there are billions of websites out there in cyberspace?
Unless Essendon can come up with a satisfactory response to all of these unanswered questions the only conclusion that can be drawn is that this whole sorry mess was one more attempt to divert legitimate player payments outside the salary cap. I await the answers with keen interest.
CORRECTION POLICY:
This information has been sourced from publicly available resources and databases. If any person or organisation believes any of this information is incorrect in any way please provide details to us at driver@magpies.net and we will endeavour to make all corrections as soon as possible.
http://www.geocities.com/buckleysurfers2003/websham.html
BOMBERS WEB SHAM EXPOSED
Exclusive Buckley Surfers Investigation
BY DRIVER
3 June 2003
By now most in the football world would be aware of the AFL investigation into the arrangement between Essendon and its two star players, James Hird and Matthew Lloyd, over the ownership of internet site rights.
Despite many in the football world viewing this arrangement as an ingenious way of quarantining these payments outside the AFL salary cap for player payments, the Essendon Football Club has consistently maintained that they engaged in a commercial transaction in purchasing an asset from these players.
As often here at BUCKLEY SURFERS, rather than sit back and listen to the various parties spin their stories through selective media leaks I decided to take Essendon's claims and put them under the microscope. It did not take me too long to discover that if this was a commercial transaction then the people running the Essendon Football Club must be some of the world's most incompetent business people of all time!
All web domain names need to be registered and ownership of such name lies with the registered owner. This is very similar to way the land ownership system operates in Victoria and it is imperative to protect your interests that you register your internet domain name and keep the registration up to date.
The register of domain names is a searchable register so that any person can determine who owns a particular site. This provides some limited protection against anonymous websites defaming people or otherwise interfering with their legal rights. Importantly it also provides an appropriate marketplace for the sale of domain name and the rights to use such domain names.
So in order to determine who owned the rights to the web names that Essendon are claiming it purchased in good faith and on a commercial basis I conducted a search of the domain register to discover exactly who was kidding who in this whole sorry saga. Here are the results.
mattylloyd.com
It is claimed in reports that the name Essendon purchased off Matthew Lloyd for a purported $50,000 was the domain name mattylloyd.com. A quick check to see what was on that site reveals that the site does not even exist. Further investigations then revealed that the site mattylloyd.com has never been registered as a domain name.
In fact, as late as last night all I had to do was provide my credit card details to any number of domain name resellers and website hosts and I could be the proud owner of this site. Of course I am not a cyber-squatter so I did not partake of this wonderful opportunity to purchase - for a few dollars - the ownership of a web name that supposedly is worth $50,000 on Essendon's commercial valuation.
Of course if Essendon had any interest at all in actually owning this domain name they would have registered the name immediately they "bought" it off Matthew Lloyd. Even more importantly from a legal point o view, Lloyd would not be able to sell to Essendon what he did not actually own, so he or his managers would have registered this name before they sold it to Essendon and would then have negotiated the sale and then arranged for the update of the register to reflect the new ownership status.
None of this has happened. None of the steps to make this a commercial transactioon on the name mattylloyd.com have been put into place by either Lloyd or Essendon. To ensure that there was no confusion over which names had been involved in this deal, I did a search for similar names to find the following:
* matthewlloyd.com is a registered to a Mr Joel Taylor from Domain Source Inc, located in Aptos, California. Feel free to click on the link to see what that site contains - it is not offensive content but neither is it content that Essendon or Matthew Lloyd have created or have any interest in.
* mattylloyd.com.au is not registered with the Australia domain name rights issuer Melbourne IT and is also available for purchase today to anyone with a credit card.
* matthewlloyd.com.au is registered at Melbourne IT to "Matt Helloy Data" which is a business name registered in Victoria. The contact person for this domain name is a Paul Hogan who appears to be an employ or a principal of a computer training company. Without casting any aspersions to anyone the ownership of this site, complete with a strange business name registration, appears at first instance to be a classic cyber squatting exercise. There is no Matt Helloy Data listed in the Melbourne phone book, there is no person called Helloy listed in the phone records in Victoria and the website itself does not exist!
jameshird.com
I used the same steps to trace back the ownership of the jameshird.com domain name. This name has been registered through a website hosting company in America called godaddy.com and the registered owner of the domain name appears as Audrey Hughes. If you follow the link to jameshird.com you will see what pops up. Again this is someone who has bought the domain names rights hoping that someone else will come along and make them an offer. I don't know who Audrey Hughes is but again I note that after having paid $50,000 for the rights to the name I was expecting to see the name "Essendon Football Club" as the owner of this site.
A search of the Australian domain name registry finds that jameshird.com.au is also an unregistered domain name. Anyone with a credit card could buy this web name right now without having to pay $50,000 as Essendon supposedly did.
Now of course none of this is totally conclusive. Of course Essendon could argue that they entered into this arrangement in good faith and that they have every intention of registering the names but have not got around to it yet.
But this would be a complete sham. As I said earlier you cannot sell what you don't own and you can't buy from someone what they don't own. Neither Lloyd nor Hird owned these domain names and therefore could not sell them to Essendon in the first place. For Essendon to pay good members' money to buy these rights without checking the ownership of the site names is totally unbusinesslike and verging on negligent when the sums involved appear to total an amount on 6 figures.
The only other excuse that could possibly be offered is that Essendon did not actually pay for the rights to the domain names but simply for the rights to be the entitled to make the application to buy the domain name as a person properly entitled to do so. This is a technical legal argument to satisfy the provisions of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which is invested with power to solve domain name ownership disputes. However, this argument would be spurious because Essendon entered into this deal with Hird and Lloyd over 2 years ago. In that time you would think they would have moved to register the names if they had any real interest in owning them or, heaven forbid, actually operating these sites.
Recently both the Tasmanian and New Zealand governments failed in long and costly hearings at WIPO to win back rights to names being operated by others even though those governments insisted they were the rightful owners of the names but had failed to register them. In the case of New Zealand they had to pay $US500,000 to someone who was running a site they believed was injurious to their tourism industry. In Tasmania's case the site is being run by someone opposed to logging policies and no money will move that person to sell back the site to the government.
I, or anybody else, could buy mattylloyd.com or jameshird.com.au today and start running content on those sites that may not serve the best interests of Lloyd, Hird or Essendon. I wouldn't do that (I reserve the right to change my mind if they beat us again in round 22) but many others would jump at the chance either as an attack on players and club or as a perceived money making opportunity.
In short, Essendon claim to have bought certain internet rights as a commercial transaction off Lloyd and Hird. Lloyd and Hird did not own these rights in the first place so how did they have the right to sell them? Even if Essendon did pay good money to buy these rights why did they not register the names to protect their legal interests and why do they remain unregistered today? And why two years later do these supposedly valuable websites not even exist when there are billions of websites out there in cyberspace?
Unless Essendon can come up with a satisfactory response to all of these unanswered questions the only conclusion that can be drawn is that this whole sorry mess was one more attempt to divert legitimate player payments outside the salary cap. I await the answers with keen interest.
CORRECTION POLICY:
This information has been sourced from publicly available resources and databases. If any person or organisation believes any of this information is incorrect in any way please provide details to us at driver@magpies.net and we will endeavour to make all corrections as soon as possible.
Reminds me of that A.R.Mani guy.
