Who would have thought that a tale of the legal shenanigans surrounding the theft of a domain name could be entertaining? But when the domain in question is sex.com it can be, as Kieren McCarthy demonstrates in this book.

Kremen registered a lot of them: housing.com, jobs.com, match.com (which he used to create a dating service he eventually sold)…and sex.com. Most of these were owned by his company Electric Classifieds. But sex.com he retained under his own name.

And it was from Kremen's personal ownership that, in 1995, a con man named Stephen Michael Cohen, stole the domain name. It wasn't hard: Cohen asked for the domain name to be transferred, and once he faxed through a forged letter confirming the transfer, Network Solutions obligingly made the switch.

At first Kremen thought it was a database error. Even after he realised the domain had been transferred, he still thought it would be easy to retrieve. He was wrong. Network Solutions behaved like a company that thought that ignoring the problem would make it go away. When it was forced into court, Network Solutions tried to argue that domain names were not property that could be stolen, but a service that could be withdrawn at any time. Meanwhile, in Cohen he was up against someone who would never give in and never admit he was wrong. The perfect ingredients, in fact, to create a wildly expensive lawsuit that dragged on for years.

During that time, Kremen went from modestly rich to poor, to wealthy, to nearly broke, to wealthy again. He went into and out of drug addiction. He went through four different legal teams, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Meanwhile, the dot-com boom came and went, and Cohen racked up money from sex.com, which he used to advertise porn sites. Even after Kremen won a judgement against Cohen for $65 million, Cohen preferred to go to jail rather than disclose a single asset.

Kremen eventually moved into Cohen's house and won a judgement against Network Solutions for an estimated $15 million. When he finally got the domain name back, he slowly turned sex.com into a business success as an X-rated search engine. In January 2006 he sold it for $12 million.

The internet is no longer as fluid as it used to be, and the value of domain names as virtual real estate is now well established. This case was a vital milestone in reaching that understanding.

In Sex.com: One Domain, Two Men, Twelve Years and the Brutal Battle for the Jewel in the Internet's Crown, British journalist Kieren McCarthy does an entertaining job of recounting this case, managing to distill ten years of legal filings into a fascinating tale. Elsewhere, McCarthy has covered the domain name system and the organisation that manages it, ICANN, for so long and in such detail that in 2006 ICANN finally gave him a job.

Money, sex, violence…and domain names. This book has it all.

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