I had my book launch on Tuesday at Bar Detroit in Covent Garden. Terrific stuff. Lots of old friends, my publishers (several of the Quercus team pictured above), and my family. Gary Kremen was there and signed various books and generally entertained people. I did that weird thing where you speak to nearly everyone but only for a very sorry time each. I also didn’t eat anything, so I have lost the last half-hour or so of the evening and felt pretty rough the next day, but there you go – if you can’t do that at your book launch, when can you?

Anyway, there are a series of reviews out. And I’ve done a number of interviews so I thought I should quickly stick up links to them while I have a minute. Guy Kewney wrote one for his NewsWireless site, which The Register has decided to buy off him. Which is good news for me because Guy really enjoyed it. My favourite part: “You think you’re going to read a racy description of the high life of a few wealthy California dotcom millionaires, playing at pornography – but what you end up soaking into your soul, is a deep understanding of the pioneering days of the Internet.” Which was exactly what my intention was. He ends it: “It’s a brilliant bit of writing. Read it if you dare.” God bless him.

Me old boss Max have given me a more critical review on Techworld. As ever, Max has a keen eye for detail. He reckons I went on too much about the US legal system and didn’t make it clear what what quotes and what was my interpretation. Max may well be right on both counts. Max also reckoned I should have covered IANA and ICANN in greater detail. I don’t know. Maybe. I had to not put in alot of stuff to make the book readable because I wanted to make it readily accessible to everyone not just IT folk. I have whole chapters covering the early DNS, and many more covering the US legal system, and I also have a whole lot of stuff on other con-men that also, sadly, never made it into the final book. Nevertheless, Max said it was a “gripping story, well told”, adding, “there can’t be many books about the computer industry that can be described as page-turners but this is”. Which coming from Max is praise indeed.

Other reviews

There is a long feature in the Silicon Valley Metro – which I had nearly forgotten about because I did the interview over the phone while doing 100 other things in Geneva. That covers the story well, covering the story with quotes from me and Kremen’s lawyer Richard Idell. And I’ve just seen another review in The First Post. They’re not so keen, saying that the author “doesn’t always make the most of his entertaining cast of geeks and porn barons”.

I think this last comment actually hits on something very interesting about the book – and something I struggled with for a while when trying to write it: the book isn’t just about one thing. It actually about a multitude of things: two men fighting one another; the history of the Internet; the US legal system; a con-man and his scams; the online porn industry; the impact of technology in the digital era.

Everyone it seems had an idea what the story was about and is either amazed or irritated that that doesn’t make the main focus. Guy Kewney saw the book as about NSI and the dangerous monopoly at the top of the Net. Max Cooter wished it was more about the history of the Net. A couple of the reviews have been disappointed it isn’t more about the porn industry. I did a Radio Five Live interview where the woman – Anita Anand – went off on a tangent about being the first person to recognise the value of domain names, and also liked the porn angle more than the others. Some reviews have complained there is too much US legal system; others that there is too little.

Interview

I have to say though my favourite interview so far was last night with BBC Radio Wales with Adam Walton. You can see him online here and listen again to the show here (at least for a week). The reason I liked this interview was because for the first time it didn’t feel like I was selling something. I wasn’t effectively in the position of having two minutes to tell people why they should buy my product. Instead it felt as if we were having a chat about something that I had decided to spend a few years of my life researching and writing because it was so fascinating. I much, much prefer that. Even if the sales were smaller as a result, give me conversation over sales pitches any day.

Anyway, I have a number of other interviews lined up this week – nearly all phone interviews, so we shall see if I can reconcile the two. I am looking forward to seeing how many books have actually been sold next week. Most bookstores in the UK have copies – but some only have two or three copies. I dread to think that people that would buy the book don’t bother because the store has sold out or they can’t find it in the store. Who knows?

Right, I have a lot of ICANN work to be getting on with…

This is the article that appeared in The Sunday Times on Sex.com today. As I mentioned earlier, the article appears under my byline but was entirely written by a writer the Times brought in. I’m interested to see what people think of the two versions I wrote and the one that’s appeared. I’ll do a poll, but feel free to stick comments on any of my posts.

I think the broad difference is that I was trying to tell the story, and the final piece has taken the tack about the Internet and domains. Perhaps my versions tried to do too much in a short space and so were too complex for easy comprehension. Anyway, the piece is in, there are a few minor mistakes in it, but then I have just been told it is linked to on the Drudge Report, so that has to be good. I only hope all this translates into people actually reading the book.

Oh, and I should say, Gary Kremen is over from the States for the book launch on Tuesday in Covent Garden. If people want to come along, please do, there’s still space for 30 or so people.

Sex.com and a web of intrigue

Two men’s battle over a domain name shows how far the net has come

In a few weeks’ time a thickset middle-aged man with a ready smile and the gift of the gab will walk into a courtroom in San Jose, capital of California’s “silicon valley” and try to plead poverty before the judge.

The lawyers he will be facing will not believe him, and with good reason: over the past decade Stephen Michael Cohen has made hundreds of millions of dollars as the self-styled king of internet porn, a business worth globally some $57 billion.

It is not the pornography that has landed Cohen in court, but the theft of something with no physical existence. That something was a website, more precisely a domain name that a geeky 31-year-old called Gary Kremen registered back in 1994 simply because he could: sex.com. It turned out to be worth a fortune. Except that it was Cohen who made the fortune, and for more than 10 years Kremen has been fighting to get it back.

The case has cost millions of dollars, involved a trashed mansion, a phantom gunfight between bounty hunters, forgery and disappearing bank accounts and forever altered the development of the internet. Kremen vs Cohen finally established that property in cyberspace can be at least as valuable as in the real world.

It seems like ancient history but it is barely a dozen years since the beginning of “the net” – when it was, in fact, scarcely a net at all, more a series of links between communications companies and university laboratories with computers.

The US military encouraged and developed these multiple links to ensure that in a nuclear strike, communications could be routed through one of many interlinked networks of computers.

This early net was an arid place of computer code with only a few bulletin boards and user groups featuring text, mostly in jargon. The idea that it would one day become a global mar-ketplace for music, movies and above all pornography was unimaginable.

Until, that is, a hyperintelligent nerd with a goatee beard, a degree in computer science and not much of a social life thought he might just have an idea.

Gary Kremen had mixed at Chi-cago and Stanford universities with the men who would go on to run Microsoft. He had built a career reselling software packages but he realised that one day people would advertise on the internet.

With remarkable prescience, in 1994 he set up a company to sell this new commodity: the online ad. Back then there were very few websites, and they were basically handed out free to anyone who asked. Nobody had yet figured out a way to make money from the internet. The answer, Kremen realised, was obvious. What would get people to look at online ads? In the same way old newspaper ads would read “SEX: now that I’ve got your attention . . .”

Kremen contacted Network Solutions and registered sex.com. It may have been free to set up, but he was about to make a very expensive mistake. He failed to set up the website.

So it was pure chance that on browsing the lists of domain names – as people like him did – one morning in September 1995 he discovered the registry for sex.com also included someone called Stephen Cohen.

Over the next four weeks – just as Network Solutions began charging for domains for the first time – all trace of his own connection to the domain name was disappearing. As Network Solutions started selling 10,000 dotcoms a month for $50 each, then 30,000 a month, then 100,000: overnight a billion-dollar industry was born.

Kremen was laughing, until he wondered why he wasn’t making more money from sex.com. His former colleagues had sold match.com for $8m. Slowly it dawned on Kremen that he no longer legally owned it. But the man who did was making a killing.

Cohen was 15 years older than Kremen, and no internet whiz-kid but a genius of a different kind. The child of a broken marriage in a wealthy Los Angeles Jewish family, Cohen flunked out of school and drifted into cheque-book fraud targeting shopkeepers.

On the side he took classes to learn the trades of private investigator and lawyer, not because he wanted to practise them but because he wanted to know the skills of the people he expected would soon be after him.

Obsessed with sex – he married five times while serially sleeping around – he set up a “swingers’ club” in conservative Orange County making $100,000 a year charging for membership. He had also set up a bulletin board called French Connection on this new internet, used by wife-swappers to arrange parties and exchange pornographic pictures.

When the web came along, Cohen too realised sex.com would be a good

thing. These were still the years BG – before Google – when people often typed whatever they were looking for into the address bar and followed it with the best-known suffix: .com.

When Kremen looked into what had happened to his domain he found it had become a membership site charging $25 a month. Banner adverts for other porn sites paid Cohen up to $45,000 a month. It was a licence to print money, on the back of which Cohen had acquired a San Diego mansion and a luxury lifestyle.

Cohen claimed to have had the sex.com “trademark” since 1979, even though the concept of .com was then unknown. In fact he had stolen it by forging a letter of renunciation from Online Classifieds, a separate company Kremen had used to register sex.com.

Kremen launched the most expensive battle in dotcom history: Cohen fought doggedly, obfuscating and prevaricating, forcing Kremen repeatedly to amend the charges against him.

Kremen had become rich through shares in booming dot.com startups. He sold out to pursue his case. The courts meanwhile argued whether a domain was really a property or just a “telephone number”, though they were now routinely changing hands for more than $3m. Cohen and Kremen had realised before the law that domains were the shopfronts for the biggest market the world had ever known.

In 2001, with virtually all his cash used up in the legal battle, Kremen finally won a judgment that awarded him $65m in damages. Cohen refused to pay, and fled to Mexico. He left Kremen with his mansion – an exclusive six-bedroom, eight-bath-room villa with a swimming pool – which he had trashed in spite, then spread the untrue story that Kremen had sent bounty hunters to bring him back. He finally turned himself in by accident in 2005 when he was arrested and handed over to US marshals when he attempted to renew his Mexican visa.

Kremen has sold sex.com for $12m but still owns sex.net and another 4,000 domain names. He still lives in Cohen’s house. With interest Cohen now owes Kremen $82m, but says he has nothing, and cannot explain where it has gone. “Follow the money,” may have been good advice in the 1970s; but in the tangled web of cyberspace, it’s no longer that easy.

Sex.com by Kieren McCarthy is published by Quercus, £12.99

The best, most exciting, most important story surrounding the formation of the Internet we know today is the incredible tale of Sex.com.

The domain was registered in the very early days of 1994 – when domains were free – by a Chicago geek called Gary Kremen. It was then stolen in 1995 but lifelong con-man Stephen Cohen who used it to build up an enormous multi-million-pound empire.

But Kremen fought and fought and fought, using up his own personal fortune from the sale of dotcom boom shares, and after years of battles – in and out of the courts – finally won the domain back. As a result, he put domain names in their proper place in law for the first time.

But rather than pay the $65 million the judge ordered, Cohen fled across the Mexican border. Kremen has been chasing Cohen around the world, trying to get his money, using the proceeds from Sex.com to fund it. Finally, after years of chasing, Cohen was picked up in Tijuana late last year and transported across the US border.

He is now sat in jail in San Jose, California, and will not be allowed out until he helps Kremen recover some of the money.

Believe me when I say that is the most straight and dull version of events it is possible to write. However, my job for the next three months will be to give this unbelievable story the treatment it is due.

I have been trying to write the full version of this story for two years now. I’ve written numerous news stories as the case has progressed, as well as the odd feature or two, but in terms of getting the whole thing down in a book, I have been held back by one literary agent after another. Eventually I decided to cut out the middleman and go straight to publishers.

And yesterday, at around 3.45pm, I finally signed a publishing contract for the book. Here is the publisher, Nicholas Cheetham, doing the deed. And above you can see the initial mocked-up book cover.

If you’re interested in the story, here are a few choice articles I’ve written on the case. I intend to update this blog from now on with news about writing the book. The hope is that this will prevent me from being distracted by other items of news going on at the moment. We shall see.

Update: I have set up a website dedicated to the Sex.com story and the book at Sexdotcom.info. It features a massive archive of articles, plus a “latest” section, two timelines and sections on the people involved and the legal issues debated. Check it out.

The Guardian
Sex.con – 26 June 2003.

The Register
Sex.com thief appears in court – October 2005
Sex.com thief arrested – October 2005
Sex.com epic battle finally ends – April 2004
Sex.com, Sex.com, you’re my Sex.com – June 2003
Sex.com conman continues ludicrous legal fight – May 2003