[stfu]

Did you try contacting the owner of the domain? The "shady domain protection service" will usually forward emails to the owner.

Probably contacting them without disclosing your existing affiliations and without coming across as aggressive you might end up with the domain for a few hundred $ instead of spending month/years feeding lawyers across the globe.

Also: Just because the domain is set to expire at a certain date doesn't mean that it is really going to expire. Self written scripts usually loose out to professional drop services ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_drop_catching ).

[fizz_and_buzz]

I would rather not disclose to the owner that I have any interest in the domain. I feel that then they will definitely extend the domain. I assume only somebody who wants to use the domain or sell it to me would use a professional domain drop service. I doubt anybody will have an interest in using this random name. And as long as nobody knows which name I am interested in, I wonder what the chances are that someone would try to snatch it away to sell it to me.