What Happened to SaveDisney.com: A Settlement Closed the Site, Then the Name Expired
SaveDisney.com carried the 2004 revolt against Michael Eisner. A 2005 settlement closed the site, and the filed deal left the registration unaddressed.
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On the morning of August 8, 2005, Coordinated Universal Time, the Internet Archive's crawler asked for www.savedisney.com and received a 404 error with one line of text: "No web site is configured at this address." Seven hours earlier, the site had still answered. The closing was on schedule. A capture from two days earlier shows the home page telling readers: "We will be shutting down on Sunday August 7th."
SaveDisney.com had been the address of a public boardroom fight. Roy E. Disney and Stanley P. Gold used it to organize a shareholder revolt, and Reuters reported that the revolt led the board to take the chairman's title from Michael Eisner. A settlement in July 2005 required the two men to shut the website. The filed agreement names the savedisney.com website but does not address the domain registration. By December 2005, a Network Solutions page said the name had expired. In December 2020, another Network Solutions page said the same thing. A new registration began in February 2021, and the name points to no website today.
A domain can serve as the podium of a corporate fight. The podium still needs a renewal, and the fight's end does not settle who pays for it. After the applause, the fate of SaveDisney.com depended on a contract clause and a date in a registrar's records.
Roy E. Disney left the board and gained a web address
Roy E. Disney's resignation letter of November 30, 2003 ran to three pages. Roy, the son of the company's co-founder Roy O. Disney, said the nominating committee had decided to leave his name off the slate of directors, "effectively muzzling my voice on the Board." He said stakeholders saw the company as "rapacious, soul-less," listed seven failures, and asked Eisner to resign. The Wall Street Journal later wrote that Roy had learned he would be forced off the board by a mandatory retirement policy. His longtime partner Stanley Gold left the board as well.
The earliest copy of the website in the Wayback Machine dates from December 10, 2003. It is a plain page with two resignation letters, a letter to cast members, two email links, and a list of other Disney sites. The page source shows that someone built it in Microsoft Word 10, and the document properties list the company as Shamrock Holdings, which the site later described as the investment vehicle of the Roy E. Disney family. The same properties show a last save on December 5. Roy's welcome note sought support "to restore the magic and wonder to The Walt Disney Company." A footer said the site was not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the company, and it acknowledged Disney's trademarks.
The date of the first registration is not known. No registration record from 2003 has surfaced in the sources we could reach, so December 10, 2003 remains the first known capture and nothing more. One small clue survives. The later expiry notices both give December 1 as the expiry date, and Gold's resignation letter carries the same date. That match is suggestive. It proves nothing.
The domain became the address of a shareholder campaign
Roy and Gold did not nominate a rival board in 2004. They asked shareholders to withhold their votes from Eisner and three other directors, and they needed a way to reach a large and scattered group of owners. Their February 12 letter, filed with the SEC and mailed to holders of more than 250 shares, sent readers to www.savedisney.com for voting instructions. It gave voteno@savedisney.com as a contact and asked for replies at rsvp@savedisney.com. The name now carried the website, the mail, and the call to action on paper.
The site also invited supporters to Philadelphia. The invitation set a briefing for March 2, 2004, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., at the Loews Hotel at 1200 Market Street, a few blocks from the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The invitation promised an event open to all supporters, unlike the company's own meeting, and it predicted "glitz and razzle-dazzle" there. James R. Whitson's account for Animated Views describes a video, a slide show, a commercial featuring Roy, and "thunderous applause" when he reached the podium.
The next day, about 3,000 shareholders attended the meeting at the Convention Center. The Journal's report records that the two dissidents received time to speak while Eisner looked on. Gold said that Eisner "has never had a bad year" while shareholders lost value. Roy objected to talk of "the Disney brand" and said, "Branding is something you do to cows." When Eisner returned to the stage, he thanked them and added, "Always a joy."
The reported vote was higher than the famous number
The number that entered the story was 43 percent. A MarketWatch report on CBS News carried it on March 4 and called the results preliminary. According to the Associated Press, the figures announced on March 3 covered votes cast before the meeting.
Disney's 10-Q, filed May 13, 2004, gives the count for Eisner as 991,814,195 votes for and 818,874,438 withheld. The filing states no percentage. Dividing withheld votes by the sum of for and withheld votes gives about 45.2 percent. Gold and Roy published a different framing. Citing a preliminary inspector's tally, they said that excluding 299,716,670 broker non-votes, 54.4 percent had withheld. That figure is their calculation, and the company's filing does not adopt it.
| Share withheld from Eisner | Who reported it | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| 43% | Disney, March 3, 2004 | Preliminary, votes cast before the meeting |
| 45.3% | The Associated Press, citing Gold and Roy, April 2004 (their own release says 45.37%) | Preliminary inspector tally, including votes cast at the meeting |
| 45.2% | Calculated from Disney's 10-Q | Reported count, withheld ÷ (for + withheld) |
| 54.4% | Gold and Roy, April 2004 | Their calculation, excluding broker non-votes |
That night, the board made George Mitchell chairman and kept Eisner as chief executive. Roy and Gold called the move "a blatant rejection of shareholder will." By December 2004, the plain page had become a larger site that carried a letter of the week, a timeline of the movement, a poll on which cartoon star should stage a comeback, and a column in which Abigail Disney answered readers' mail. Eisner later said he would retire at the end of September 2005. Roy and Gold sued to void the choice of Robert Iger as his successor.
The settlement gave the website its own numbered section
The fight ended on paper on July 8, 2005. The settlement agreement, filed with the SEC as an exhibit, committed Roy and Gold to dismiss their Delaware suits and barred them from soliciting proxies through the company's 2010 annual meeting. It made Roy a Director Emeritus and a consultant at $150,000 a year until the 2008 annual meeting, with an office at the Burbank studio.
Section 3 carries the heading "SaveDisney.com." Roy and Gold had to stop adding material at once. Within 30 days they had to "shut down their savedisney.com website for the duration of the Term." They could not "establish, sponsor, support or authorize any similar website" during that Term. The section allowed an email of the joint press release to subscribers, and postings "consistent with the orderly winding up of the website."
Thirty days from July 8 is August 7. Roy told readers that the site would close that day, with regrets and with the satisfaction that it "has served its purpose."
Read closely, the filed agreement treats the campaign as a website. The word "domain" does not appear in it. It does not say who would hold savedisney.com, whether anyone had to renew it, or what would happen to it after the Term. We do not know whether the parties handled the name in some other document. The filed text is silent, and this article reads that silence as a gap in the record and draws no legal conclusion from it.
The renewal date arrived four months later
On December 8, 2005, the home page redirected to a Network Solutions "under construction" address. Two days later, the archive captured a renewal page with a short sentence: "This domain name expired on 12/01/2005 and is pending renewal or deletion." The page told the current registrant to renew, and it offered everyone else a backorder through SnapNames. The page also listed "related categories" such as "Disney Bambi" and "Disney Lion King."
The page does not name the registrant, and it does not explain why the registration expired. A reader could take it as a deliberate choice to let the name go, or as an administrative lapse after the campaign ended. No source we found settles the question.
Then the trail goes cold. The Wayback Machine's index lists no capture of the home page between December 2005 and December 2020. Current lookups show only the present registration, and we did not use a paid historical WHOIS database. So the record does not show who held the domain during those 15 years.
Other events did occur in those years. Roy E. Disney died on December 16, 2009, aged 79. Disney scheduled its 2010 annual meeting for March 10, 2010, and a later 8-K shows that shareholders voted at the meeting that day. That meeting marked the end of the settlement's Term. The promise about the website outlasted one of its signatories by less than three months. No capture shows the site returning.
The next page in the archive, from December 5, 2020, carries Network Solutions links and another notice: "savedisney.com expired on 12/01/2020 and is pending renewal or deletion." Its suggested searches included "Best Penny Stocks" and "Healthy Weight Loss." The month and day match the 2005 notice, which suggests that a registration with the same anniversary had continued. The match does not show who paid for it.
The current registration was created on February 19, 2021, 80 days after that expiry date. By May 2021, the address showed a NameBright "coming soon" page. On November 3, 2026, the registrar's WHOIS record listed a privacy service as the registrant organization, the registry gave an expiry date of February 19, 2027, and the name's nameservers returned no A record. Nothing in the record connects the present holder to the 2003 campaign, and nothing in it suggests any improper conduct.
A later campaign reached for the same words
Twenty years after the Philadelphia meeting, another dissident fought Disney's board with its own campaign website. In the 2024 proxy contest, Trian Fund Management said it might publish its shareholder materials on its website, www.RestoretheMagic.com. The phrase echoes Roy's 2003 note and the capital letters of his 2004 mailing, though no filing we read links the two.
The contest was different. Roy and Gold ran no candidates of their own in 2004. Nelson Peltz stood for a seat, and Disney's certified count gave him 370,974,890 votes for and 819,744,149 withheld. Disney's full slate of 12 directors won. The registry shows a 2016 creation date and a May 16, 2027 expiry date for RestoreTheMagic.com. On November 3, 2026, the name returned no A record, and we could not establish who holds it.
Four decisions keep a campaign domain from drifting
The SaveDisney.com record cannot tell us anyone's intent. It can show where a campaign's name goes when nobody writes down its future. Any group that builds a public campaign on a domain can make four decisions early.
- Name one owner. Record the legal person or entity that holds the registration, and do not leave the name in a staff member's personal account.
- Assign the renewal. Give one role the renewal date, the payment method, and a backup contact. The campaign's staff may leave before the date arrives.
- Handle the domain in any settlement. If a dispute ends with a website closing, say what happens to the name: who keeps it, how long, whether it must stay inactive, and whether it can be sold or allowed to expire.
- Preserve an archive. Save the pages, letters, and subscriber notices in a form that outlives the site. Much of what survives of SaveDisney.com exists because an outside archive crawled it.
These are practical record-keeping steps. Whether a given domain raises trademark questions is a separate matter, and this article takes no position on any name in this story. For how those disputes work, see cybersquatting versus legitimate domaining.
Sources and further reading
All sources were fetched on 2026-11-03. Wayback pages show what a page displayed at capture time. SaveDisney.com pages are one party's statements.
- The Walt Disney Company and Shamrock Holdings of California, Inc., Roy E. Disney and Stanley P. Gold — Settlement Agreement, July 8, 2005, Exhibit 10(hh), section 3 and Exhibit A
- The Walt Disney Company — Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2004, Part II, Item 4
- Roy E. Disney and others — Notice of Exempt Solicitation, filed February 17, 2004
- The Walt Disney Company — Form 8-K/A, certified results of the April 3, 2024 annual meeting
- Trian Fund Management — Definitive additional materials, Schedule 14A, 2024
- The Walt Disney Company — Preliminary proxy statement for the 2010 annual meeting and Form 8-K, March 10, 2010
- Wayback Machine, savedisney.com — December 10, 2003, December 2, 2004, August 6, 2005, December 10, 2005, December 5, 2020, May 4, 2021
- Roy E. Disney — Letter of resignation, November 30, 2003, archived from savedisney.com
- Bruce Orwall, Brian Steinberg and Joann S. Lublin, The Wall Street Journal — Eisner Steps Down as Disney Chairman, March 4, 2004, copy hosted by NYU Stern
- The Associated Press via NBC News — Disney dissidents: More anti-Eisner votes, April 16, 2004
- Reuters via NBC News — Disney ex-dissident to end savedisney.com, July 14, 2005
- Dan Collins, MarketWatch via CBS News — Turmoil In House Of Mouse, March 4, 2004
- James R. Whitson, Animated Views — A Front Row Seat in Philadelphia, March 6, 2004
- NBC News — Roy Disney, nephew of Walt, dead at 79, The Associated Press, December 16, 2009
- Verisign RDAP — savedisney.com and restorethemagic.com registration records, read on 2026-11-03
Contributors
Aileen Wright is a student in her twenties living in New York City, where the distance between a museum wall and a library reading room is a short walk and a long afternoon. She came to name writing through art and history — the way a single portrait, coin, or manuscript margin can carry a name across centuries and change its meaning on the way.
Most weeks you can find her in Central Park with a paperback, or in the quiet of a public reading room chasing down where a name actually comes from rather than what a name-list says it means. She is also teaching herself to code, which has made her oddly precise about spelling, sorting, and the small details that decide whether a name ages well.
For Namefi she writes about the history and culture behind domain names, the stories brands carry as they rename, and the difference between a good story and a verified source.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.