January 06, 2006

Proloxil, as you may or may not know, is my idea. It's a made-up medication that I invented in 2003 for the purposes of satire, cartooning, and t-shirt sales. Copyrighted and all that.

So, imagine my surprise when I discovered that someone had registered the proloxil.com domain in 2004.

There was no actual content at the address, just a placeholder. So I was pretty sure I had a cyber-squatter, someone who intended, somehow, to profit from my idea. My word. My satire! No no no, I said to myself, this shall not be.

Using Whois, I identified this cyber-squatter. And through cunning Googling, I found out a bit about him, just in case I needed, you know, to exert some pressure. Then I sent a "chest-forward" e-mail. Proloxil is mine! I told him, and he had no right to the name. I would pay him $14.95 for the domain, not a penny more, because that was how much it would cost me to register it with my own registrar.

He wrote back. "Yikes!" he said. "That was kind of a mean e-mail. Of COURSE I will give you the domain." The domain was registered through 2007, and he asked if I would cover his prepaid costs. I wrote back, apologized for my tone, and explained that I thought he was a squatter. His terms were completely fair, so I agreed.

And then: he simply gave the domain to me. The amount of money involved was less than he thought, he said, and asked me to do something nice for a stranger by way of karmic recompense. He set up an account for me with his registrar, sent me all the account's login information, and wished me a happy New Year. He even arranged it so that proloxil.com forwards to this site, and reminded me to change the password that he had created, so that he would no longer have access to the account.

Still don't know why he registered the domain.

But it was a wee bit of a lesson for me, nonetheless.