On Wednesday Deadspin.com posted an article about Tom Brady the quarterback of the New England Patriots and his legal battle with the National Football League. The subject of the story was an email leak that the NFLPA (Players Union) released in response in their lawsuit with the NFL.
Deadspin which focuses on sports, touched upon one nugget of interest to domain owners, a potential domain purchase of the domain Name TB12.com Deadspin however only published one email related to the domain name TB12.com.
Now anyone could take the time to dig up this information if they had a PACER account or signed up to get one, paid the .10 per page and were willing to go through over 1,400 pages of emails.
I went through 1,400 emails, because you see the emails were in no order, there was no rhyme or reason to how they were released.
So I finally got to the info on TB12.com
TB12 is Tom’s brand, for those not familiar with Tom or American Football, Tom Brady is the quarterback for the New England Patriots and his number is 12. So Tom is emailing someone about a myriad of issues about TB12, one of them is intellectual property.
Now some emails have certain info redacted, other things don’t make sense as the name of the CEO of a company Tom works with is redacted, but it has his title and company name, so it is not too hard to figure out who the person is.
Tom Brady starts out emailing Robyn Glaser who works for the Kraft Group, (Robert Kraft is the owner of the New England Patriots). From reading everything and putting pieces together it seems that maybe some domain names were under the Kraft Group instead of Tom Brady or TB12. Robyn Glaser responds.
Tom then has an email communication with the CEO of SCS Financial, the CEO was forwarded a message and asked Tom Brady,
“BTW-who owns TB12.com?”Tom Brady replied “Somebody who is squatting”
Next up is an email from Tom Brady, to someone whose name has been redacted, like I said this stuff is all over the place and you have to piece it together, they are not just straight sent and received, some of these fwd’s look out-of-place. But first Tom is replying to Robyn Glaser, I did not post what Robyn Glaser said as it was all redacted, but Tom Brady does say “I am good with all of that”. Then the CEO of SCS chimes in. One common theme throughout all this is that people keep remarking how cheap reg fee domains are.
Above you see the first time that someone mentions to purchase the name in stealth mode using the old student model. I thought it was funny he mentioned the Chinese, they do like the naming convention of LLNN.com (article I am currently working on) and there have been many websites in China sued for selling counterfeit merchandise.
Jeff Surrette, Senior Vice President of TB12 responds, (This was the one email about TB12.com that Deadspin published)
From: Jeff Surette
To: Tom Brady Alex Guerrero
Sent: February 26, 2015 4:59:00 AM PSTIt’s interesting — someone’s owned the TB12.com domain for 13 years, so it’s possible that they’re not a squatter and just like the “TB12” name, which is probably a better situation for us. Last week Tony suggested that — if we did want to try to buy TB12.com — we should do everything possible to conceal the real identity of the buyer. Apparently he’s gotten good deals in the past by having interns convince squatters that they’re doing school projects, etc. It’s worth doing whatever we can, I suppose. Anyway, here’s the status of the most relevant domain names I could come up with. Let me know if there are others that you think I should check. Anything in red is owned by someone else, anything in green by us / RKK. Given that these cost $10/year to register, I’d recommend that we lock up all / most these available names.
So here we see Surette has done a bit of homework and that the domain owner is using the name in good faith and not trying to squat on or cause confusion with Tom Brady or TB12.
Surette goes on to say,
Anyway, here’s the status of the most relevant domain names I could come up with. Let me know if there are others that you think I should check. Anything in red is owned by someone else, anything in green by us / RKK. Given that these cost $10/year to register, I’d recommend that we lock up all / most these available names. I can’t see what those domain names are as they were redacted out of the email. This next part I will say I laughed out loud, it is from the CEO of SCS Financial and he thinks squatters are douchebags:
I first thought it was interesting that he deemed Network Solutions as “cheap” they are one of the most expensive registrars out there for a .com registration.
So to answer the question that the CEO asked, obviously from the previous email from Surette, this man is named Tony, but anyway, they did register Tbrady12.com, UATB12.com ?, TB12UA.com and TB12brain.com, they are under Jeff Surette’s name at Gandi of all places,
I thought he said Net Sol was so cheap.
All of the domain names were registered on March 3, 2015.
It does not look like they got TBTwelve.com, that one was registered in 2014 at Go Daddy under privacy.
Up next, it looks like Jeff Surette has found out a little more about the owner of TB12.com.
Actually Mr. Surette, there has been content on the site as far back as 2003 according to archive.org, the site quoted the Bible and the owner stated that his name was Twelve.
That was the end of the emails they did not get the domain name obviously.
They did register TB12.net on June 13, 2013 at NetSol. The domain is under privacy. Someone else registered TB12.org at Go Daddy.
I think it is clear that they were never getting the domain by the route they wanted to go, “the student who has no money”. They may not have gotten it going to Mr.Smith with a big offer, he seems to be a religious man, and the name may have more inherent value to and some one time payoff was not going to result in a sale. That is just me speculating, maybe $100,000 gets the job done, Tom Brady certainly could have afforded that, with proper due diligence his team would have understood the writing on the website since 2003, that the registrant has legitimate rights, and the proper way to negotiate this kind of deal would have been straight up. It is interesting to note that TB12.com was pointing to the Deadspin story on Wednesday, today it is not resolving.
On another note it does not seem Mr. Brady’s representatives do not know about new gTLD’, as the domain name TB12.Football is available to be registered as of publication for $15 at Godaddy.com.
No dealing with Cybersquatter douche bags required.
