U.S. Cybersquatting Law Goes Global

typecast writes: "Better bone up on Bulgarian trademark law before you register your next domain name. A U.S. federal court has ruled that laws protecting trademarks in foreign countries apply under the American Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) of 1999. (Note to the U.S. registrants of Quartz.com: watch out!)"

Comments

Not as evil as the article states.

[Lumpy]

Sorry, but if you register some domains and then hope to extort thousands out of it, you deserve to have it taken from you. I know that the law can and will be twisted by lawyers (remember all lawyers are evil scumbags, they will screw you for their own gain at every chance they get.. no, I'm not biased). The implications of this are designed for good intentions... What if a US moron was trying to extort cash out of a poor company in the country that was formerly known as the USSR for his domain name? Granted anyone with 1/3'd of a brain can come up with a workable replacement..

Re:Not as evil as the article states.

[mshiltonj]

Sorry, but if you register some domains and then hope to extort thousands out of it, you deserve to have it taken from you.

Translation: You can be a company afraid of the Internet and be slow to adjust to market market pressures. When you finally open your eyes and see that others have taken advantage of your lethargy in hopes of monetary gain, you need not fret -- just taken them to court.

After all, we now know that successful corporations are not allowed to fail. In times of trouble, entire industries will recieve multi-billion dollar bailouts. Laws and courts will favor successful companes (like anti-cybersquatting laws) and in the rare cases that a corporation does fail, Congress will hold dozens of hearings to find out why and make sure that it doesn't happen again.

Existing corporations and existing power-structures are not allow to fail or be challenged.

cleveland.com is in trouble

[perdida]

I am with Robertson on this one.

The Internet is not a Dewey Decimal System library. The indexing and categorization of information, as it's manifested in the meaning in URLs, is a natural process. It happened due to geeks being funny, people trying to make money, and so on. We have the wonderful histories of sites like www.whitehouse.com, which brings up the question - is it true that people who want information on the web about the White House would not want to see a porno site? I don't think so.
Protection from surprise on the Internet should not be the realm of the government, but the realm of the individual.

Re:Exactly, If foreign companys want an address

[aridhol]

that is why they have their own fucking country codes.

Funny, I thought the United States had a .us country code. Why should France use .fr if the United States can't use .us?