Having recently formed up a new company, my business partner and I had an idea one day. We’d call our development group Skunkwerkz. It was an inside joke. Nothing ever came of it until one day I needed a domain name. I was building an email archive and needed a domain name to host my old corporate email on for searching purposes. What better place to do that than on our development machines, so I registered skunkwerkz.com and set it up. No web site, no publicly reachable email accounts, etc. Hidden away from the public eye, not visible except via WHOIS, etc. Just for me, just my little thing. All was clicking along fine until one day, I got a really ugly email from an attorney.

So apparently Lockheed-Martin FUCKING SUES PEOPLE for registering domain names that “infringe their trademark” and I made the hit list. My little joke that I never intended to be publicly available apparently got found and was misinterpreted. So apparently they’ve got attorneys that sit around and dig through WHOIS or something. WHISKEY-TANGO-FOXTROT?!?!? Maybe they have a bot or something that scans for it. Whatever the case, I got a nasty gram from them showing previously won cases and a list of domains that they’ve ceased… over 100 of them. Some not even really all that similar. But apparently, you can’t use the name Skunk and Works in the same sentence without lighting these guys up.

So with that, my email archive is now moved over to good ol’ Intellidick.com where it will live out the rest of its days. The skunkwerkz.com domain has been surrendered and I’m left without anything. They didn’t even offer to cough up the $12 bucks to cover the registration fees.

Long live Skunkwerkz.com, my pointless little joke that never was going to be anything more than a URL for me to use. Oh and to all of the attorneys that have nothing better to do than sit around and scan the WHOIS registry, congratulations on being great at your job. You got what you wanted. You took away my freedom to enjoy the internet. Thanks for that.