Alain here from the Stanford Bitcoin Group. I am not related to the CryptoNote project at all, nor is the Stanford Bitcoin Group. I started an open source project called Cryptonote (
https://github.com/alainmeier/cryptonote) in May 2013 and then was approached in March 2014 by someone from the CryptoNote cryptocurrency project who wanted to buy the domain, so I sold it to them. It's just an unfortunate coincidence.
The CryptoNote team has claimed that the name 'CryptoNote' was something they had been using for previous projects. Almost like they wanted to imply that they were associated with the Stanford group.
Do you happen to have any details on the person who bought the domain from you?
Were you curious about their project at all at the time? Did they let you look at any source, or ask for your opinion?