Warren Redlich Speaks

Warren Redlich, who owns the campaign domain for the Christine O’Donnell’s 2008 Senate campaign website gives us the scoop on his interactions with the O’Donnell team.

Comment by Warren Redlich on 13 March 2010 at 8:04 am:
Hi – I’m Warren Redlich. There isn’t much of a connection. Here’s the short story:

One of my hobbies is acquiring expiring domain names and “recycling” the websites. One of my favorite types to acquire are old campaign websites.

I typically restore as much of the old site as possible and call them “legacy campaign websites.” It’s a little bit of my own contribution to history, and a little bit of self-promotion – I put links from the sites to other sites that I own.

In some cases I also value the potential political speech in case that candidate runs for something again (if I don’t like them I can criticize them effectively). Usually those are for candidates in my area – philsteck.com and traceybrooks.com are good examples.

So I did this with the christineodonnell08.com domain name, winning a GoDaddy auction in February of 2009. At a certain point she or her campaign team noticed.

They’ve contacted me a few times over the past 13 months. They were not polite. On more than one occasion they have threatened to sue me. Since I’m a lawyer and I actually know what I’m doing, the threats were not scary.

I should note that no one else noticed this because, well, the site then looked mostly as it did before. And I had offered to post a prominent link to her new campaign site. That offer was ignored.

Then something changed.

They filed a copyright notice with GoDaddy. This shut down the site. I give credit to GoDaddy, because they make it easy to respond to the copyright issue and they restored the site very quickly.

Since I am no longer able to preserve the history of the campaign – it would violate their copyright – I put up new content. The current site is the result.

So what does this mean?
A. Her campaign team is not very smart. They let the domain name lapse which is a somewhat common mistake, but the best campaign teams know better. I know this because I hunt them and some of the most desirable old sites keep getting renewed.

B. They are also arrogant, and unwise. If you’re going to threaten to sue a lawyer, you better know what you’re doing.

C. They don’t think ahead. What did they think was going to happen when they filed the copyright notice?

D. All of these point to something else. They never tried to understand me. It never occurred to them that I believe what I’m doing has value. They never considered my investment in the site (mostly time but also money). They never tried to work with me – something I was willing to do.

So what does that say about their candidate?

Warren

What I think it says – amateur hour. But we already knew that, didn’t we.

Thanks Warren for sharing your story.