Jim Davies vs Nominet – The Truth Behind the Court Order Claims

Hardly a month goes by without a fresh episode of comedy from Jim Davies or Weighted Voting. This time, he’s arguing with himself about how spectacularly he lost to Nominet in court — court orders say it was very bad, and he wants that changed to just plain old bad.

The full blog post is here: WeightedVoting

For that, this legal genius wants to open the whole issue back up and risk getting slapped with bankrupting legal costs. But what on earth was this court claim actually about – nobody seems to know – well, actually, I do, and it’s beyond bizarre.

This isn't a group of people, it's just Jim posting unhinged rants early in the morning, it did genuinely start off as a group, but Nominet have said they will address those issues. The group part of it has long since left town, but let's say that there is one, I'd be amazed if the group had sight of, or sanctioned any of these recent posts.

“We previously posted about Court Orders being changed after a Hearing at Central London County Court.”

“Nominet’s lawyers have now shown us the orders they drafted.”

There is no “we” or “us” — it’s just his sad little mind writing and trying to hide behind the credibility of a group of people who put their names to something 3–4 years ago and have little to no input in anything WeightedVoting.uk does.

Jim, just be honest — it’s you. You should own that and write “I”, “me”, “my”. Everyone knows it’s you writing it; at least be honest about your personal grievances instead of hiding behind the group. Granted though, a High Court Judge has never said WeightedVoting.uk was talking papable BS, so I can see why you thinking hiding your involvement behind them is advantageous.

Before I take you down one of the many rabbit holes that Jim operates in, there are things ongoing that even I can’t speak about. Mr Davies has a lot of fires to try and desperately put out over the next few months and years. As this has taken a lot of money and time to put together. I don’t want to let Mr Davies use this post as some kind of excuse to avoid facing the substance of what is coming down the line for him.

On the other hand, his attacks on Nominet shouldn’t be allowed to go unchallenged. His usual Modus operandi when losing is to try and rile up innocent Nominet members to jump to his defence - I'm determined not to let that happen here without giving them a fuller version of events, the stuff Jim leaves out. Whilst Nominet and their staff may hold their tongue, I’m not as constrained on this one issue he has posted about.

As many of you know, Mr Davies tried to DRS my company using false information, even he admits it was false, although attempts to downplay the seriousness of it. This is just one tiny fraction of what he tried to pull.

“Some of the chronology in the first DRS was incorrect, but the substantive claims remain unchanged… Inadvertent (but immaterial) errors have now been corrected in this DRS.”

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Funny Jim Davies quote after getting caught not telling the truth - (again).

"Immaterial" - like his attempt to hint that an agreement should be backdated by two months, and then hiding that same dated document from Nominet’s Experts. Let’s leave that one for others to deal with, shall we? Oh, and it is being dealt with.

Anyway, knowing full well that he was about to lose the DRS, he started to get a bit erratic. First of all, in June 2023, he tried to stall the DRS process by contacting Nominet’s Senior Legal Counsel and telling him that Nominet should hold the DRS whilst he went and got a trademark sorted. He cited the fact that the DRS policy mentions they may suspend the DRS if a Court of Competent Jurisdiction is also involved. He argued that because I had objected to his company’s trademark application, this counted as an alternative legal process. Nominet disagreed and confirmed that things would proceed in line with the standard DRS policy, but it would forward on Mr Davies request and if the independent expert wanted to postpone things he/she could, they chose not to.

July came, and Mr Davies’s company lost the DRS. Mr Davies convinced his partner, Mr Toth, to dig into his pockets to the tune of around £3,500, or whatever it was, and appeal. It rambled on for another two months or so.

Just before we reached the decision of the appeal in September 2023, Mr Davies, knowing full well that he was going to lose, went full crackpot and started demanding that Nominet once again suspend the DRS. This time, he insisted that Nominet’s Senior Legal Counsel should also recuse himself and appoint an independent panel to decide whether or not the DRS should be suspended pending the trademark application.

After a series of emails, on the 18th of August 2023 Nominet’s Senior Legal Counsel once again denied Mr Davies request stating (not word for word) that the IPO was not able to decide the fate of the domain name and therefore not a Court of Competent jurisdiction for the purposes of clause 25.1 on the DRS policy. But, he would again forward Mr Davies latest emails and give them to the 3 Independent Appeal Experts and they could decide before they heard the DRS. Just like the previous expert, these 3 also decided against Mr Davies’s request to suspend the DRS process and continued to evaluate his DRS.

Nominet’s DRS Appeal Experts returned their judgement on the 13th of September 2023 and they decided against Mr Davies’s company’s allegations the domain was abusive of their rights. Insisting that it was for a Court to decide - now two and a half years on, why hasn't Mr Davies been to Court? Hint, think back to what the High Court Judge said about his BS stories under Cross examination - find them in this blog post.

Remember when he was told twice that the Intellectual Property Office isn’t a Court of Competent Jurisdiction for the purposes of clause 25.1? Well, this madman decided that if the IPO wasn’t up to the job, he needed to go out and find a real Court. Exactly 14 days after he learnt that he lost the DRS appeal (14 days, which is suspiciously the same time as a letter before action needs) he started Court action in London County Court and loosely mentioned the DRS in the particulars of claim.

Then this legal genius went back to Nominet and on 27 September 2023, said:

Dear DRS Team and Nominet's Senior Legal Counsel [Name Redacted by GW],

Please find attached:

Claim Form issued today at Central London County Court; and

Receipt of claim filed at Central London County Court.

In accordance with DRS Policy, these are proceedings related to the domain name and consequently the DRS should be suspended automatically. Kindly confirm that this has taken place.

Yours sincerely,

Jim Davies

It’s quite clear he thinks this Court action will somehow suspend the DRS process. So, in a last-ditch effort to stop the DRS (which was already long over), he’s launched Court proceedings on a number of issues.

By this point, it had already been a full year since he lost the 2022 elections and it had been more than two months since Nominet decided to omit him from the 2023 ballot for the Non-Executive Director position. It would be quite the coincidence if this Court action were genuinely about those and not the DRS – a truly remarkable feat of timing.

Thankfully, nobody but a trained professional should ever attempt to get inside this chap’s head. I can’t say with absolute certainty what his motivations for this Court case were – but let’s be honest, the dates fit, the emails fit, and he never discloses to his followers what on earth he was trying to do – it all points to one last desperate attempt to salvage a failed DRS claim. Who in their right mind starts a claim against Nominet in some misguided bid to stop a DRS?

He has some unfounded inflated views of himself – someone who sees himself as a grand representative of the domain industry, utterly incapable of accepting defeat in any dispute that might expose him for what he really is.

Sure, when you hear him in one of his blog posts talking about how he’s going to apply to the Court for disclosurer of communications between Nominet and their solicitors. Are any of you aware how many times that has happened in English legal history? Ane he thinks he is going to pull it off for this?

It sounds impressive to people who catch domains, or run registrars and don’t have a legal background. But to anyone who actually practices the law, it’s just nonsense. He’s the kind of lawyer other lawyers laugh at – and I know that first-hand.

Well, you decide. I wrote to the London County Court requesting documents relating to the claim. Judge for yourself what he was actually asking for – and whether he was granted any of it.

However he chooses to present it to his small online following, the reality is that he lost, and lost badly. He is, in truth, fortunate that Nominet did not seek to recover its costs in relation to this episode. I do not know why that decision was taken, so I will not speculate.

What is clear, however, is that none of this was ever in the interests of Nominet or its members. Jim conveniently omits from his WeightedVoting.uk post that this was a claim brought by Jim Davies, for the benefit of Jim Davies – not for the membership.

His subsequent post claiming that costs to members could somehow be reduced if Nominet’s solicitors disclosed their communications with the Board to the Non-Executive Directors is, frankly, unfathomable. Perhaps the better course would have been not to pursue such an ill-conceived claim in the first place if he had an ounce of concern for the members pockets.

When one considers how much this individual has cost Nominet over the years, both directly through his own conduct and indirectly by encouraging others to follow similarly misguided causes, the total must by now exceed well over a million pounds.

Does it really matter? If you think this is even an issue, you’re missing the point entirely. Why do you think he made that post in the first place? What reaction was he trying to provoke, and whose emotions was he trying to exploit to get it?

Yours!

For the record, no chance they deliberately change those orders - he isn't that important to them. Only in Jim's head is he important to Nominet's board or their legal department. Why would someone risk their pension, risk their job, their Solicitor's license to deliberately alter this order?

Think about it logically. They know he's a pain in the backside and cries over every single mistake someone else makes, why would they change it knowing that he would get a copy of the final orders? It makes no sense.

Because he pee'd off their legal department? Lawyers are making so much money on the back of Jim's antics, why would they want to harm their golden goose?

Hate him? The legal department down there probably love him.

The whole WeightedVoting blog post was calculated to manipulate – the maniuplation is evident in the blog post, he decides to give some information (the part that suits him), but not all - such as what the Court case was about - he witholds that. If you look closely, it’s obvious who benefits when you take the bait: him, not you, and certainly not Nominet’s members. My opinion is that he's a trouble maker that would rather burn Nominet to the ground than for it to be successful without him. In his eyes the company and some of its staff wronged him in 2008 and they must pay.

The point here isn’t whatever distraction he’s cooked up – it’s that Jim Davies has started yet another crackpot claim in court and, once again, got his backside handed to him after costing Nominet and its members tens of thousands of pounds.

I’ve never spoken to Nominet about any of this, but you don’t need to. You can apply a bit of common sense and read between the lines. If he’d actually gained something meaningful from any agreement or settlement, how come it took him around 5 months to realise that Nominet had “changed the orders” and that he hadn’t got it? Logic dictates it can’t have been anything substantial. Otherwise:

a) he’d have known immediately that he hadn’t received it, and

b) he’d have raised the issue straight away after he received a copy of the orders - did he not read them at the time?

We’ve already seen in an earlier post on WeightedVoting.uk that Jim couldn’t even get Nominet to play along with his antics – “Nominet Refuses to Agree To Confirm Fair Non-Executive Director Elections.” Of course, this wasn’t Nominet refusing to confirm that the elections were fair; it was Nominet refusing to play his games.

If common sense isn’t enough, just look at his claim form and ask him which of the four things he was demanding he actually received.

Frankly, I hope he does take it back to court – if only so Nominet gets the opportunity to reopen the case and pursue full costs. Now there’s your “settlement.” Tactically, risking that outcome has to be one of the daftest moves I’ve ever seen a lawyer make – though given that the next nine daftest have all come from him as well, it’s hardly surprising.

In truth, he got lucky and walked away without costs last time. He may write a few small bits to the judge, but he’s not going back to court and risking opening this up again — everyone who knows him knows that. That’s exactly why he’s posting about it: he knows there is no legal route to remedy without enormous risk, so he’ll try to get the mob to do his bidding instead.

Classic Jim.

Now you know what the Court case was about. Hopefully many of you are more enlightened than you were 20 minutes ago. Same as all my blog posts on this subject and this individual, don't believe anything he says as he usually leaves out the good stuff. You know, the actual context!

Nominet already knows everything I’ve written here – and far more besides. Just because they don’t publicly defend themselves with what they know doesn’t mean they can’t; they simply choose not to, because they have competent legal advisers. Don’t punish them for showing long-term legal discipline by jumping on this bandwagon or being manipulated into acting – that’s exactly what he wants.