The fate of sex.com, one of most valuable internet domains, could be decided during the next few weeks.

Online smut peddlers have spent the last two years in legal scraps about ownership of the name, but now the battle is finally due to come before US courts.

The XXX hot property domain has been valued by porn analysts to be worth more than $250m. In total, it currently grosses more than $100m a year. However, San Francisco web entrepreneur Gary Kremen claims that Stephen Cohen, the current owner, cheated him out of the domain.

Kremen is suing Cohen to get the name back. "It was stolen, literally stolen," Kremen is reported as saying.

He claims that he registered sex.com in 1994 with Internic, but that the lucrative name was stolen by Cohen, who used a cleverly forged letter to Network Solutions to transfer ownership of the domain to himself.

"I woke up one morning, and it was gone," said Kremen. "It's like someone forging the title to your house and then taking it over."

Today, sex.com boasts a subscriber base of nine million, all paying monthly subscriptions of $25. As if that weren't enough, Cohen also charges up to $1m a month for other pornographers to splash banner ads across his site. "It's a very, very lucrative business," said Cohen.

First published on uk.internet.com