Checking up on it again, he was happily surprised with some of the results:

I asked him again today via private mail and his response was swift. The whois entries for phpshield.com now point to his person and we can expect additional information on the web site itself soon. I like it when things can be resolved like that and I actually think this is a chance for his product rather than a possible competition issue.

This helps to more clearly define the difference between the PHPShield and SourceGuarian products. You can find out more information about each product from their sites - PHPShield and SourceGuarian. Both are encoding packages to help protect and distribute your code.

This article contains PHP implementation of whois client (as a function ae_whois), which may be used to request domain information from specified whois servers.

Their method uses the socket functionality (fsockopen, fwrite, fclose) to make a connection to the remote server for the specified domain's information.