Google has been hosting Google Books at books.google.com. But, since February of 2004 (well before Google announced its foray into scanning books), googlebooks.com has been registered to someone else. Who precisely isn’t clear, since the domain was registered through a proxy service. The site currently hosts an ad for a product called “Google Nemesis” — which appears to be a mash-up between a standard Make Money Fast multi-level marketing scheme and an SEO keyword optimizer. CLick through any of the links, though, and the site reports that “DJK Nemesis” is sold out. (How, one might ask, can a product that consists entirely of software, information, and access to a web site sell out? Good question.)
Google filed for a UDRP arbitration last month to wrest control of the googlebooks.com domain from its current owner. That current owner never responded to the complaint. On June 10, the arbitration issued a ruling accepting Google’s allegations that the domain infringed on its trademarks and was being used in bad faith. As a result, he ordered that it be transferred to Google.