Bodog down

It looks as if the US legal situation and Ayre's/Bodog's vulnerability in regard to appearing in the USA may have played a hand to their disadvantage here.

On August 1st a Washington State judge in Kings County, Seattle issued a court order on the registrar for Bodog.com to have the site removed due to an unanticipated "patent infringement" claim.

It was part of a judgement in favour of a company called 1st Technology LLC against Bodog Entertainment Group, with the former winning an award of $48 937 456 (how do they work out the nickels and dimes on these massive claims LOL!)

Bodog may not even have been aware of the action, or decided that it was too risky to enter the States to defend it, or perhaps did not want to give the USA the power of jurisdiction over it. In any event, Bodog did not appear and suffered for it.

Known Bodog registered domains have been suspended, and as an immediate bandaid solution the company registered New Bodog - the company has trademarked the BOdog brand and has said it is going to fight the action with determination. The implications for brand, business, search engine positioning and other elements are clearly significant.

According to Internet searches, 1st Technology LLC is "....a leading technology licensing company with a patent portfolio of advanced Internet and multimedia innovations.

"1st Technology is headed by Internet pioneer Dr. Scott Lewis who led the development of the world's first single integrated circuit chip with on-board video and audio compression, advanced adaptive digital signal processing technology at Oxford University, and introduced multiple broadband Internet and multimedia technologies. 1st Technology has a long list of industry leaders as licensees.

"The violation relates to the Method for the production and transmission of enhanced multimedia information.

"An optimization method is disclosed that enhances the interactivity of multimedia information. The optimization method includes separating a multimedia information into primary and secondary layers and enhancing that information in the primary layers such that the perceived psychographic information quality is improved. This method has the advantage of providing compression and/or transmission algorithms to maximize enhancement of the multimedia information."

Bodog boss Calvin Ayre says: "We are fighting this dispute and are confident that we will win."

His group continues to offer customers full service despite the domain dispute, with Bodog staff working through the night to get the alternative site up and running.

"Nearly all aspects of the website have been updated to reflect the environment our clients are accustomed to," says Ayre. "We are working to resolve any of the minor remaining glitches on the alternate site, but other that it is business as usual."

The CalvinAyre.com blog is dead, but the Bodog Beat remains active, so not all brands have been nailed yet.

The litigation timing is significant and presumably intended - the first two to three weeks of football are the busiest of the year for online sportsbetting in the North American market.