Interesting article here about a complex legal situation -
Mucho weirdness as Google “forgets” to renew major domain - Domain Incite
Google has lost control of a key domain name, breaking millions of URLs used by its customers. It emerged today that the domain blogspot.in expired in May and was deleted around June 24. It was promptly re-registered via a non-ICANN registrar based in India called Domainming and put up for sale...
domainincite.com
Judging by the changing status codes, it appears that two years ago somebody — Google, MarkMonitor, NIXI or Afilias — put the domain into a state in which it could not be renewed, transferred or deleted.
For some reason, the domain stayed like that until just a couple of weeks before it expired, when the prohibitions on deletion and transfer were removed.