While watching the New England Patriots play the New York Jets today at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, I have been catching up on some domain news from the past week, including an article about the Jets.com domain sale.

I read that Jets.com was sold by Sedo for $375,000 last week. According to the Whois information, the registrant is currently “Sedo LLC Domain Transfer Escrow Service” which is standard for domain names that are undergoing an ownership change with Sedo acting as the intermediary.

I also saw that the nameservers are currently set to Sedo’s DNS, ns1.sedoparking.com ns2.sedoparking.com, although I am not sure when those nameservers were changed. Previously, the domain name was owned by a private jet charter service, and the website was a jet airplane booking engine.

At the moment though, it appears that the domain name has advertising related to the NFL’s New York Jets (see screenshot below). There are PPC ads for the following football-related offers:

HSN.com: “New York Jets Shop for Jet’s Gear at HSN Low Prices On NFL Team Merchandise!”

NFLnewsline.com: “Patriots vs Jets Matchup Our NFL Game of the Week! Get the Latest Info & Week 2 predictions.”

Justbuytickets.com/Jets: “NY Jets Tickets Just Buy New York Jets Tickets New York Jets Tickets All Games”

I am not an attorney and have very limited legal knowledge, but I am wondering whether this usage could put the domain name at risk. If there is any risk, I am wondering who has responsibility for this risk, since the domain name is technically registered to Sedo right now pending transfer to the buyer.

This would certainly be a moot point if the NY Jets purchased this domain name, but if they didn’t, I sure hope the new owner will take steps to mitigate the risk ASAP. This is somewhat similar to the Dolphins.com UDRP (domain now owned by the NFL), although the Dolphins still aren’t using Dolphins.com. Incidentally, there was a UDRP filed for Dolphins.com and Jets.com back in 2000, but it was terminated.

A few weeks ago, I reported on the Miami Dolphins UDRP filing for the domain name Dolphins.com. After a short period of time, the UDRP was suspended, and the Whois information changed, showing the National Football League as the new owner of the domain name. I assumed that the team wanted to use the domain name for their website, rather than their current MiamiDolphins.com domain name.

With the football season set to kick off this coming week, and the Miami Dolphins scheduled to play the Atlanta Falcons on September 13, one would anticipate that now would be a time that Dolphins.com gets considerable type-in traffic. People are looking for rosters, stats, team schedule, tickets, collectibles…etc. Rather than forwarding the domain name to the current website to capture the traffic, the domain name is not resolving – a big mistake. I don’t believe they would have anything to lose whatsoever by forwarding the domain name to the current website.

At the moment, there is a splash page on MiamiDolphins.com that says “the all new Miami Dolphins.com Coming September 8.” Because of the graphic, I can’t tell if they are planning to change the primary url to Dolphins.com or to keep it the same, but I sure hope they decide to use Dolphins.com instead of having it not resolve.

As reported last week, the Miami Dolphins filed a UDRP for the domain name, Dolphins.com. According to domain registrar and brand protection company, Mark Monitor, Dolphins.com is now owned by the National Football League (see screenshot below), although the DNS has not been changed nor the domain forwarded to the Miami Dolphins website.

A few days ago, I noticed that the status of the UDRP filing was listed as Suspended, and now the domain name has been transferred, despite the current PPC links. A Suspended proceeding generally means that the two sides either reached some sort of agreement about the UDRP proceeding or a lawsuit was filed to prevent a ruling.

Although I don’t have any details about what was worked out in private, perhaps it will be reported in a future public corporate filing.

The Miami Dolphins football team has filed a UDRP for the domain name Dolphins.com, which is parked and currently shows NFL football-related PPC advertisements, including an image of a football stadium. In addition to advertisements for “Miami Dolphins Tickets,” there are also ads for figurines and “Swimming with Dolphins Retreats.”

According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing (2006 Annual Report) filed by Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX), the publicly traded company owns Dolphins.com (as of 2006). Further, in the same filing, Marchex listed MDNH, Inc. as a subsidiary, and Dolphins.com is currently registered to dnsadmin@mdnhinc.com. MDNHINC.com is registered to MDNH, Inc.

This is a high value domain name, both because of its generic nature (animal domain names are always in demand) and because of the NFL team with the same name. This is going to be an interesting case to watch with these two heavyweights going at it, especially because of the potential impact of losing the domain name could be on Marchex’s bottom line. IMO, this is easily a six figure domain name.