Gary Kremen
From Free net encyclopedia
Gary Kremen is an entrepreneur who first registered the domain name sex.com in 1994. He also started match.com in 1993. He was assisted early on by Peng Ong, the founder of Interwoven and Fran Maier of TrustE.
In 1996 a convicted fraudster, Stephen M. Cohen, contacted Network Solutions and fraudulently had the domain transferred to his name.
Kremen took the matter to the courts where he struggled to make a case, on limited resources, against Cohen's multi-million dollar pornography empire.
Kremen took the upper hand when two of Cohen's rivals in the pornographic industry, Seth Warshavsky and Ron Levi, helped fund Kremen's case. After a long and complicated legal battle headed up by cyberlawyer Charles Carreon, the domain was eventually returned to its original owner, Kremen.
In the meantime, however, Cohen had profited vastly through the property and Kremen tried to wrest back some of these profits through further court action. He was awarded a judgment of $65 million against Cohen. Kremen also successfully litigated again Network Solutions http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/9th/0115899p.pdf
Cohen fled to Mexico and moved the money offshore.
On October 28th, 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported that Cohen had been arrested in Mexico and turned over to US Authorities. [1]
Kremen sold sex.com to Escom for $14 million in January 2006. [2]