And if he wasn't going to contact anyone, watching for the domain name to drop, and manually registering it at that point, is a recipe for disaster. It may not

And if he wasn't going to contact anyone, watching for the domain name to drop, and manually registering it at that point, is a recipe for disaster. It may not have been feasible for him to set up an automatic registration script (although I see he was using Route 53, so maybe it would have been?), but being first in line to drop-catch a domain name is the exact purpose of services such as SnapNames. Took a terrible and unnecessary risk on top of not doing the "most ethical" thing.