First Criminal Case of Domain Name Theft Is Underway

New Jersey authorities have decided to charge Daniel Gonclaves with several domain theft-related felonies. The 25-year-old computer geek is accused of stealing the P2P.com domain name from Marc Ostrofsky, Lesli and Albert Angel in 2006, which he later sold to NBA superstar Mark Madsen for 110,000 dollars.

Besides this accusation, Gonclaves is charged with computer fraud and identity theft after hacking into an email account that contained security and sensitive information about the P2P.com domain name.

The P2P.com domain name was initially purchased by Port to Print Inc., which later sold it for 160,000 dollars to Marc Ostrofsky, Lesli and Albert Angel. With the information gained from the email account, Daniel Gonclaves auctioned off the domain on eBay, which was bought by Los Angeles Clippers basketball player Mark Madsen.

Soon after the sale, the legal owners of the P2P.com name filed a complaint with the New Jersey police department and a negligence lawsuit in Florida against GoDaddy, the domain registrar that oversaw the sale. Later lawsuits were filed against Mark Madsen and Daniel Gonclaves. According to Ostrofsky, an Internet domain name hunter that made 7.5 million dollars from the sale of business.com, the three initial owners of P2P.com have spent 30 months and 500,000 dollars trying to get their domain back.

This case seems to be a corner stone for U.S. laws, since it is the first time a person has been accused of theft by unlawful taking or deception of an intellectual property. U.S. Law considers that a theft occurs when the owner of a property is permanently stripped of a personal good. This same principle stood behind the copyrighting law, which charges offenders with copyright infringement, and not theft.

This case seems to be different, since profit has been made, and a third party was involved in a financial transaction, which stripped the original owners of their property. Daniel Gonclaves was arrested on July 30, 2009, and later posted a 60,000-dollar bail.

Presently, the P2P.com domain is in Mark Madsen's property, until all the lawsuits and criminal investigations are concluded.