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How Many Domains Does Your School Own?
ADrexelStudent asks: "A debate has been brought up in recent months at my school, Drexel University, on the issue of whether the school should be allowed to own over 300 domain names. One domain, drexel.com, has been purchased from the students that owned the site, which was being used as a student forum. Another site, drexel.org, is under contest from the school against it's owner, a student. The university claims they didn't know the owner was a student and hence filed a lawsuit claiming trademark violation. Problem is the school doesn't own the trademark, a furniture company with no relation to Drexel does. Out of all the 300+ domains, only one outside the .edu TLD is being used, drexel.com, prompting the argument that this is an attempt by the university to silence student opinion on the Internet. My question for slashdot is how many schools out there purchase domains with no intent to use them, should student tuition be used in this manner, and what is your opinion of this practice?"
Whether or not they posess the trademark, a school will not be able to silence student's opinions by regaining control of drexel.org or whatever. There are simply too many places to put up a webserver and I have a feeling that the domain name matters less than the number of students contributing to the server.
I guess the question is, why isn't this drexel company stepping in and sorting everyone out?
Well.. I agree..
But the way to do multiple websites is to use www.science.drexel.edu, www.staff.drexel.edu, etc...
~username is fine for individual users pages on a given server perhaps...
DNS issupposed to be heirarchial.. the problem is it's also a be-all-end-all lookup service for the WWW now.
You want ford? YOu don't look up 'ford motor company' in an index and go to the site, you go to 'ford.com'.. that's the problem.
Higher education doesn't run just off tuition. Most larger universities take in millions of dollars a year from the State and Federal Gov't. Some in the form of grants. Others straight up dollars into the budget.
As a tax payer I want to know how MY MONEY is being spent. If a tax payer funded organization is wasting thousands of dollars on leagal and domain fees, then I'm pissed. The tax payers of the state entrusted money to see that standard of education was met. And as it stands I can't even fathom a good reason to waste that much money.
Then again, I think the entire higher education system is worse at wasting money then the federal gov't.
I don't know if you meant this as a hypothetical or not, but it does happen.
.com version of our brand name, and that's where people were going to look for us, so I argued that grabbing the .net and .org versions was unnecessary.
.org version we passed up. Guess who looked like an idiot?
Here's another example: I discouraged a former employer from snapping up every possible related domain name. We had the
Well a few years later, we found that a British neo-Nazi group had acquired the