Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com

First, Dropbox has not commented on why Dropbox.com redirects to them, nor about their lawsuit of the domain owner. Therefore, this is a horrible news article, with an assumption that Dropbox holds an new ownership stake in the domain.<p>Second, it's actually quite possible Dropbox asked the .com holders to forward traffic to the real site in order for both parties to value the domain's contribution to downloads/upsales from type-in traffic (is it 90% new users? Or almost always those who have an account?). This would mean TechCrunch hurts Dropbox by increasing their cost to buy/license the domain.<p>Third, we can't tell who owns the domain, so it could still be the same party! The .com could forward to the real site for just one day to tease Dropbox by sending it visitors for just one day. This also means they could point to the real site for a month, then a competitor later on after links start rolling in.<p>Finally, I don't think this owner, nor Justintv.com, are cybersquatters since they owned their domains since the 90's.

From the PDF:<p><i></i><i>"21. Plaintiff has expended considerable time and effort promoting and advertising Dropbox, using DROPBOX as its brand name. To date, Plaintiff has spent in excess of $1 million dollars marketing the DROPBOX brand."</i><i></i><p>They have $1.5m in funding (according to CrunchBase), and they've spent over a million dollars on marketing already? There has to be an interesting story in there somewhere.

It's worth mentioning that the first hit for "dropbox.com" on Google is the actual site, "getdropbox.com". Many people navigate to a site by googling its URL then clicking the first link.

At MIT's Startup Bootcamp, Kyle noted a similar squatter on <a href="http://justintv.com/" rel="nofollow">http://justintv.com/</a>.

FWIW, I was trying to find out what the site looked like before this kerfuffle. I only found this:<p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://dropbox.com" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://dropbox.com</a><p>which doesn't show too much except for some godaddy.com domain parking.<p>If it was just a domain parked while the guy was trying to figure out what he wanted to do with it, I'm not so excited about the outcome. If it was misleading site pretending to be getdropbox.com, then that's a whole other story.<p>There really needs to be a better system for domain name registration. I'm all for inexpensive domain names but perhaps there should be some sort of waiting list, and if people are on the waiting list, the renewal fees get raised by a set amount each year (perhaps capped at something like 25%) as long as there was a waiting list. Once the person doesn't renew, the first person on the waiting list gets it but they get charged at the new rate.<p>In that way, you couldn't just squat on a domain without doing something with it and eventually there would be a fair market price for it. If no one wanted it, the price for the domain would stay low.<p>There is probably still some gaming in a system like that but at least it would encourage more turnover of unused domains, which would be a good thing.

It is unrelated to this post but, dropbox rocks. I have tried 4 different file sharing services but dropbox simplicity and efficiency beats them all.

I wonder if this service is only available to US companies? If my foreign company registers a trademark in my own country then finds a website that was registered 9years ago will the US court force them to hand over the .com domain?

So will dropbox.com redirect to getdropbox.com in perpetuity, or will you guys eventually migrate over to the new domain?

I don't know who this "everyone" is who thought they owned the domain. I certainly noticed before I signed up that they used a different domain.<p>That said, it's excellent that they get the domain that they deserve, which will undoubtedly increase traffic and profit for the company.

I was just noticing earlier today how clumsy a dl.getdropbox.com/u/00000/file URL looks<p>Feels weird being exhorted to "Get Dropbox" when I already using one...

Like TheFacebook.com -&#62; Facebook.com. Now we just have to wait for the $150+ million acquisition from HP or EMC.

so how much did you guys ended up paying(or was it free?)...or is this some huge corporate secret

Sucks that it took lawyers, but good for them

My offer to break that guy's knees from summer 2007 still stands.

I thought google just bought dropbox.com? <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=857101" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=857101</a>