Patent is mostly about whois proxy email services.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted patent number 8,751,685 (pdf) to GoDaddy for “Domain name hijack protection”.
The patent, applied for in 2010, is actually a divisional patent of an application I wrote about in 2008. The earlier patent application hasn’t been granted yet.
The majority of the patent is about whois proxy services (e.g. DomainsByProxy) rather than domain theft prevent; It’s a divisional and continuation patent to a number of proxy related patents GoDaddy has filed.
As for “domain hijack protection”, the patent describes a way of blocking transfer requests sent by email. Although the language isn’t quite clear, it sounds like the patent is describing the old way of transferring a domain name: the losing registrar would send a confirmation email to the registrant and the registrant had to click a link in that email to accept the transfer.
The patent suggests that a whois proxy service could stop that transfer notice from ever reaching the domain owner, thus preventing an unwanted transfer.
Of course, clicking a link in an email to confirm a transfer is no longer required. It’s the opposite, in fact. Now an email is sent to the domain owner informing them of the transfer. The transfer will go through if they do nothing. Blocking a transfer email from reaching the domain owner would be a bad thing.
As of the end of March, GoDaddy had 127 issued patents and 176 pending, according to the S-1 statement if filed yesterday.
Domainer Extraordinaire says
How ironic. More names have been hijacked from there than any other place I know of.
Jay says
@Domainer Extraordinaire
Which would be the norm since they are the largest. Rare to hear about small registrars as they have few customers. Been using GoDaddy for 11 years with an account rep and never had one issue. Security there with an account rep is flawless as nothing can move from my account without a phone call from them to me at a private number and a secret word, phrase etc… given or the transfer is denied.
Andrew Allemann says
I agree. Two-factor authentication + account rep protection is better than what almost all registrars offer.