Slightly Sadder Schadenfreude.
Jan. 8th, 2009 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogI noted a couple of weeks ago that there was some self-satisfaction in hearing that a client's most relentless creditor, which forced it into Chapter 11, wound up in Chapter 11 itself before the end of last year. Today brings similar news, although not quite as much glee. For one thing, my client in this particular story is long-ago, long-defunct, and long-unpaid. For another, today's news is affecting people I know in an unfortunate way.
The word came when I got home from the office and work-type rounds, a little early today, on account of the memorial service tonight. It was an email from the church, letting us know that their email was expected to be down for most of the coming week because their email provider was going out of business.
While I've helped with technology in the building, it's only been on the individual user end, nothing to do with the net or ISP connections, so I called to find out who it was.
And was rather shocked to find out who.
BuffNet is one of those pioneers of the local internet community. It was a longtime supporter of the Buffalo Free-Net, the community-based source of free email accounts and text-based internet surfing that was many peoples' introduction to the Web in the mid-90s- including me, and including some current and former members of this very site's Flist. It thrived on providing dialup access when AOL was an expensive proposition, but always tried to stay ahead of, or at least in sight of, the curve when it came to adapting to changes in the tech standards and the markets.
At the height of their power in the community, I got to know them in the worst of ways. In 1997, I took over a Chapter 11 that had been filed, and was languishing, in the local court on behalf of another of the early service providers in this town. The case itself tanked within a few months after the owner got in trouble post-filing with paying his bandwidth bill and his case wound up being dismissed out of Chapter 11 and the business closed, but one aspect of the case went on for months even after that: a dispute between my client and BuffNet over the former's, um, rather prospective appropriation of the domain name "buffalo.net."
These were early, primordial, and rather frontier-justice days out on the ol' intarwebs. My client was one of the earliest entenpreneurs to figure out that there was value in domain names. He even managed to register the name "tops.com" to keep it from one of the largest local supermarket chains, but the fight in his company's Chapter 11 case wound up being over a name in the somewhat less valuable domain realm ending in dot-net.
"buffalo.com," by all accounts, was off limits at that point to all local competition. It had been grabbed by someone in Buffalo, Wyoming, and didn't get transferred here until well into this century, when Warren Buffett's billions extracted it for the local paper's purposes by one means or another. So my guy just went down the list and secured "buffalo.net," about a nanosecond before BuffNet thought there might be some value in its using that as a secondary domain name.
Their attorney was a knowledgeable and tech-savvy guy, and he brought a case before the bankruptcy court to enjoin us from using a name that, in his opinion, people associated with HIS client rather than with mine (a name now mostly forgotten to local history but, at the time, well-known in the local internet community). We opposed the injunction, saying that "buffalo.net" was essentially a generic name for use in this area, and if BuffNet chose another equally generic name for its business, well, tough toenails.
The Bankruptcy Judge- who I'd known since his days as clerk of the court, bringing him an incredibly complex procedural case with my mentor on this very day in 1986- wrote an amazingly detailed, well-researched and, I might add, favorable decision (not that it mattered at that point), saying essentially that the name "Buffalo" -in Buffalo, New York, anyway- was as good as fair game for domain-name purposes to the first taker, and that BuffNet couldn't enjoin our use of it without proving at trial that we were intentionally trying to ply the waters of their own good name. It was probably one of the first court decisions in the entire country on such issues and may have contributed to the early development of thinking and decisions.....
And yet, almost a dozen years later, it is lost to history. This particular Judge only believes in publicly posting his most significant of decisions- ones that were picked up for publication in the major case reporters, or which contributed to legal scholarship in other ways. Also, this being 1997, in the years before the electronic docketing of every stinking document in the entire court system, it wasn't routinely scanned into the court's file, either. Not even the proceeding docket says specifically how the case turned out. That's a shame, because on this apparent date of the aggrieved party's own obituary, I would have loved to have posted a copy of it. I'll call his chambers tomorrow, and if I can sneak out a paper copy, I'll scan and post a link to it here.
The church is switching to Verizon. One of BuffNet's principals did eventually acquire the name "buffalo.net" after my guy went under, but that registry expires on August 30 of this year. I think I'll put it in my calendar and see if I can score it then, just for old times' sake.
The word came when I got home from the office and work-type rounds, a little early today, on account of the memorial service tonight. It was an email from the church, letting us know that their email was expected to be down for most of the coming week because their email provider was going out of business.
While I've helped with technology in the building, it's only been on the individual user end, nothing to do with the net or ISP connections, so I called to find out who it was.
And was rather shocked to find out who.
BuffNet is one of those pioneers of the local internet community. It was a longtime supporter of the Buffalo Free-Net, the community-based source of free email accounts and text-based internet surfing that was many peoples' introduction to the Web in the mid-90s- including me, and including some current and former members of this very site's Flist. It thrived on providing dialup access when AOL was an expensive proposition, but always tried to stay ahead of, or at least in sight of, the curve when it came to adapting to changes in the tech standards and the markets.
At the height of their power in the community, I got to know them in the worst of ways. In 1997, I took over a Chapter 11 that had been filed, and was languishing, in the local court on behalf of another of the early service providers in this town. The case itself tanked within a few months after the owner got in trouble post-filing with paying his bandwidth bill and his case wound up being dismissed out of Chapter 11 and the business closed, but one aspect of the case went on for months even after that: a dispute between my client and BuffNet over the former's, um, rather prospective appropriation of the domain name "buffalo.net."
These were early, primordial, and rather frontier-justice days out on the ol' intarwebs. My client was one of the earliest entenpreneurs to figure out that there was value in domain names. He even managed to register the name "tops.com" to keep it from one of the largest local supermarket chains, but the fight in his company's Chapter 11 case wound up being over a name in the somewhat less valuable domain realm ending in dot-net.
"buffalo.com," by all accounts, was off limits at that point to all local competition. It had been grabbed by someone in Buffalo, Wyoming, and didn't get transferred here until well into this century, when Warren Buffett's billions extracted it for the local paper's purposes by one means or another. So my guy just went down the list and secured "buffalo.net," about a nanosecond before BuffNet thought there might be some value in its using that as a secondary domain name.
Their attorney was a knowledgeable and tech-savvy guy, and he brought a case before the bankruptcy court to enjoin us from using a name that, in his opinion, people associated with HIS client rather than with mine (a name now mostly forgotten to local history but, at the time, well-known in the local internet community). We opposed the injunction, saying that "buffalo.net" was essentially a generic name for use in this area, and if BuffNet chose another equally generic name for its business, well, tough toenails.
The Bankruptcy Judge- who I'd known since his days as clerk of the court, bringing him an incredibly complex procedural case with my mentor on this very day in 1986- wrote an amazingly detailed, well-researched and, I might add, favorable decision (not that it mattered at that point), saying essentially that the name "Buffalo" -in Buffalo, New York, anyway- was as good as fair game for domain-name purposes to the first taker, and that BuffNet couldn't enjoin our use of it without proving at trial that we were intentionally trying to ply the waters of their own good name. It was probably one of the first court decisions in the entire country on such issues and may have contributed to the early development of thinking and decisions.....
And yet, almost a dozen years later, it is lost to history. This particular Judge only believes in publicly posting his most significant of decisions- ones that were picked up for publication in the major case reporters, or which contributed to legal scholarship in other ways. Also, this being 1997, in the years before the electronic docketing of every stinking document in the entire court system, it wasn't routinely scanned into the court's file, either. Not even the proceeding docket says specifically how the case turned out. That's a shame, because on this apparent date of the aggrieved party's own obituary, I would have loved to have posted a copy of it. I'll call his chambers tomorrow, and if I can sneak out a paper copy, I'll scan and post a link to it here.
The church is switching to Verizon. One of BuffNet's principals did eventually acquire the name "buffalo.net" after my guy went under, but that registry expires on August 30 of this year. I think I'll put it in my calendar and see if I can score it then, just for old times' sake.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-09 06:55 am (UTC)http://roflrazzi.com/2009/01/08/celebrity-pictures-tennant-pop-up/
This reminded me of you :-)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-09 02:04 pm (UTC)I love the new blog:) All one entry of it, even. To get it onto my friendspage, I set up a syndication for it, which your LJ buds can add to their pages, too so they dont have to wander off the rez to read it: