Slashdot Mirror
Ruling the Root
Overcoat writes "Interesting review on Salon of the recently published book by Milton Mueller entitled Ruling The Root. The review claims that ICANN's dominance of the Domain Name System will lead to the end of free speech the the internet: 'But what is surprising, and disturbing, is the process by which control over the domain name system has been used to extend intellectual property rights to new heights. Ultimately, the free-speech utopia of cyberspace is evolving into a domain where corporate interests have more power to control speech than they have had in other arenas.' Not sure if trademarking "yahooo.com" constitutes a really big threat to free speech, but it's still a thought-provoking article."
For example, Yahoo gets to trademark not only its own name, but at least 30 misspellings of its name. And it can prevent other groups from registering domain names with the word Yahoo in them, even if they are not competing in any way with Yahoo's business. In both cases, Internet practice goes beyond established legal precedent.
So what? Those misspellings are obvious attempts at getting money (from popup circle jerks for porn sites, usually) off Yahoo!'s brandname - shouldn't they have the right to stop that? It'd be like naming a product CocaCola instead of Coca-Cola - the intent is obvious.
When scientologists can get slashdot to remove comments from the site because they violate copyright laws, or ms bitches that slashdot comments violate the dmca, or when corporations think that everyone should be identifiable on the internet, or that web pages with criticism should be sued into oblivion, or when someone makes a secnario on kuro5hin about the vice president, you get the secret service knocking at your door, we should be worried about free speech on the internet
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
At first I thought this was a BS article bemoaning the special treatment the rich get when arbitrating domain name disputes. But they save a very big surprise for the end.
"Copyright interests now view expanded WHOIS functionality as a way to identify and serve process upon the owners of allegedly infringing Web sites," writes Mueller. "That is, 'technical coordination' of the domain name system is already being leveraged to police the content of Web sites as well as their domain names. Moreover, public law enforcement agencies, notably the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, have become deeply interested in the use of WHOIS to supplement their law enforcement activities. Ultimately, the intent seems to be to make a domain name the cyberspace equivalent of a driver's license. Only, unlike the driver's licenses database, this one would be publicly accessible to anyone and everyone to rummage through as they pleased."
People will draw different conclusions from this. But it's certainly not just about trademarks.
We're on the road to Tycho.
I'm interested in reading the book's take on this, but it seems to me that DNS was never meant to be twisted into what it's being used for today.
DNS's primary purpose was to allow someone to lookup a numerical address from a hierarchial alphanumeric one. It was never meant to be a search mechanism for people to find an organization. That's what directories like X.500 and LDAP, or search engines are for. The very fact that there can be multiple commercial entities primarily identified with the same word makes DNS wholly unsuitable for this.
I think we need to scrap DNS and start over from scratch. Hand out names as needed for technological reasons, and set up a directory for users to provide an organizational name and get back links to that organization's web site(s). Regulate that directory with all of the intellectual property and trademark crap that you want, but do it in such a way that local IP and trademark law can be respected. Hide DNS (and maybe URL's entirely for that matter) from the user through their browsers, and utilize certificates for establishing identity, instead of the basic assumption that if the domain name in the URL "looks right", then it must be them. I might even go so far as to suggest that when an organizational's DNS domain is created, they automatically get a certificate that allows them to sign for SSL sites within that domain, keeping the organizational identifier the same.
When is the last time you wanted to go to burger king, called it buger king, and ended up at some other resturant trying to sell you a "buger king" burger? That doesn't happen in the physical world, it is isolated to places where a businesses physical address is how it spells it's name. There is nothing wrong with registering misspellings.
I have gone to slashdot in the past, mispelled it, and gotten an X10 popup ad...with slashdot's content. It took me a couple visits to realize why it was happening, as everything else seemed normal. Web sites have a right to try and protect themselves from domain hi-jacking like that. Another example is the paypal knock-off site, which says, or used to say how auwful paypal was. I don't know the adress, or whether is is still in opperation, but I am sure paypal wasn't happy about that.
It's one thing when some has a site "slashdotsucks.org", and quite another when someone has a site "salshdot.org" which is obviously intending (based on the content) to get "slashdot.org" visitors. A website should be able to register all the trademarks they want for both of these types of cases.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
- Geeks invent neet trick.
- Others pick up on it, and geeks love it.
- Business types notice and start horning in.
- Geeks make gazillions with infrastructure upgrades.
- Business types slowly kill the whole thing with greed.
- Geeks bemoan loss of control once the money runs out.
- Geeks invent new trick...
The internet as a way to exchange "dangerous" ideas has been dead for a long time. The problem now is that the Ciscos and the JDS Uniphases are not putting out outrageous paychecks to geeks.Believe nothing -- Buddha
If you accidentally end up in a booger king whatever you do... DO NOT ACCEPT ANYTHING!
Believe nothing -- Buddha
Look at slahdot.org for example - Number of visits: 384835. It obviously works, and that's even a relatively hard one to misspell accidentially.
Watch it happen to Linux...
What is indisputable, whether you blame the courts, the legislators, or the lawyers, is the fact that our system of governance can't figure out how to ban what everyone knows should be banned. This should be shocking for people of common sense. And it should be embarrassing to us as citizens.
Look: I understand that censorship is the sugar in the gas tank of our political culture, it makes everything stutter and shimmy and eventually grind to a halt.
But, it seems to me, this also reveals the prissy, cowardly, and -- most of all -- spoiled nature of our political leaders. Most arguments about government control have a certain logic to them. We allow the most stuff, the stuff out on the periphery of social and legal behavior for the simple reason that if we allow the stuff on the fringe, the freedoms at the core of our constitutional order will be preserved. For people who zealously defend our Second Amendment rights, this means arguing about the right to carry concealed weapons into churches, schools, airports, wherever.
Abortion rights and pro-life activists follow the same logic. Not long ago the NARAL crowd wouldn't even concede that killing a live baby -- after the umbilical cord was cut! -- constituted murder. Pro-lifers argue that a tiny clump of cells has rights.
Whether you agree with the substance of their positions, the logic is generally consistent. Indeed, even if you believe -- as I do -- that the Founding Fathers would have burst into laughter at the idea that a school couldn't have a nondenominational prayer before graduation, these slippery-slope arguments still have to be taken seriously.
But this overly mechanistic logic careens into wild, self-serving hypocrisy when it comes to the issue of censorship. For some reason the editorial pages, Congress, hordes of academics, and, of course, Hollywood types, honestly, truly believe that the state cannot proscribe images of women getting it on with horses in public libraries for fear we'll skid down the slippery slope to tyranny. At the same time, however, they fervently believe that the federal government can regulate the content of political ads leading up to an election.
This throws out the whole doctrine of protecting the fringe to safeguard our essential freedoms. If you think some talentless boob who defecates in a tuna can and calls it art is the canary in the coalmine of our free-speech rights, fine. Or if you feel that some hacked-out code from a bearded linux hippie that lives in his parents' basement is speech, wonderful. But, if you believe that, I am at a loss as to how you can tolerate a federal government that attaches all sorts of strings to the fundamental liberties the Founders considered essential to a free society.
Lamar Alexander noted a long time ago that if our current laws existed at America's Founding, Tom Paine would have been required to register "Common Sense" with the FEC.
For examle, in its decision overturning the federal anti-child-porn law, the Court answered critics that some images of pedophilia might entice or encourage would-be pedophiles or child pornographers, the Court replied, "the prospect of a crime...by itself does not justify laws suppressing protected speech."
This is the same Court that regularly holds that "the appearance of corruption" is sufficient justification for draconian regulations of political speech at the heart of our republic. The "appearance of corruption" is a standard which acknowledges no crime has been committed at all. Things just look corrupt because some people are too stupid or too lazy to discern the truth or too cynical to believe the truth when they see it. Don't get me wrong, of course there's corruption in politics -- though vastly less than at any other time in American history -- but saying that citizens spending money on speech creates the "appearance of corruption" -- and therefore it's worth regulating -- is an insult to our collective intelligence.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
people may mark you a troll for that, and i love linux myself, but i already see it happening with Lindows, united linux (what a joke), and the whole transgaming/debian debacle. Linux still has some years to go, but i feel that it may have just jumped the shark
www.google.com
or: 216.239.39.101???
Both work fine; so we don't absolutely need a dns on the internet at all- in fact I think it is becoming less and less important already.
And we're supposed to be upset that choosing global mnemonic is politicised? That businesses pay for mnemonics that happen to match their businesses name? That they try to protect their name? I'm sorry but that doesn't bother me. Creating novel names is easy. I mean what did 'google' mean? It didn't mean anything.
Personally, I'm much more concerned about search engines- I don't really see the point of DNS lookups so much anymore. If search engines in general and google in particular really starts to sell out, the internet could be in trouble. Google is a much more flexible, practical, and less politicised, less bought system; but I expect that to slowly change.
Still, there are other things on the internet that peform equivalent functions. Peer-peer systems usually don't use DNS much; we could switch over to use them at a pinch- there would need to be some work done, but p2p is harder to buy, it can be open sourced, and the search engine is totally distributed unlike google.
(Yes, I know that p2p search is slow and inefficient right now, but there's better p2p search algorithms that can be applied that are fast, scalable, distributed and robust, and give similar results to a google if we care to do that. The only reason we're not using them right is because nobody has been forced to implement and deploy them- but they can be if google starts to mess up.)
Summary: even if DNS is going to hell in a bucket. Who cares?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"From: Pub-Enforcement [enforcement@ebay.com]
Dear Domain Name Registrant:
It recently has come to our attention that you have registered a domain name that mimics the famous eBay name and trademark. As you are likely aware, the coined term "eBay" is one of the most famous names on the Internet. eBay owns several registrations for the eBay trademark in the United States and internationally. Accordingly, eBay enjoys broad trademark rights in its name. For your information, in a decision by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a third party trademark application to register the trademark "ebaysecurities" was denied due to the USPTO recognizing the eBay trademark as a famous trademark, and thus entitled to broad protection. We are concerned that your domain name infringes and/or dilutes the famous eBay trademark. Infringement occurs when a third party's use a company's trademark (or a confusingly similar variation thereof) is likely to confuse consumers as to the affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement of the third party's services. Trademark dilution occurs when a third party's use of a variation of a company's trademark is likely to lessen the distinctiveness of the company's famous trademark. In this case, your use of the suffix "bay" in your domain name is likely to lessen the distinctiveness of the famous eBay brand. "eBay" is an arbitrary and fanciful trademark; neither "eBay" nor "Bay" describe online trading or e-commerce in any way. Therefore, it is likely that you chose your domain name to evoke eBay's famous brand. We take these matters quite seriously. As you may know, we settled a dispute similar to this one against a company using the name www.bidbay.com . BidBay has agreed to change its domain name, company name, and to pay eBay an undisclosed sum of money. Attached for your information is a news account of the settlement.
More information on trademark law may be found at http://www.fplc.edu/tfield/aVoid.htm. Federal and state laws, including the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999 () provide for serious penalties (up to $100,000) against persons who, without authorization, use, sell, or offer for sale a domain name that infringes or dilutes another's trademark. Infringers who have been notified of such infringing activity, but do not cease their infringements, may also be considered "willful" and could be subject to additional money damages and liability for attorney's fees. Having received this e-mail, you are on such notice. Trademark protection is very important to eBay. In addition to the Bidbay.com case, we have filed several successful federal court actions against cybersquatters. We have also filed more than six proceedings before the United Nation's World Intellectual Property Organization's arbitration panel; all cases order the transfer of the domain names at issue to eBay.
While eBay respects your right of expression and your desire to conduct business on the World Wide Web, eBay must enforce its own rights in order to protect its valuable and famous name. We appreciate that you may have registered the above-mentioned domain with the best of intentions and without full knowledge of the law in this area. Nonetheless, under the circumstances, we must insist that you stop using the domain name, do not sell, transfer or offer to sell the domain name to any other person, and simply let the domain name registration expire. Please confirm by replying to this email that you will comply as requested. Thank you for your anticipated cooperation.
Edith
eBay Legal Department
As far as I can tell, this is a FORM LETTER, triggered a scan of new domain registrations. Anyone got a similar one?
So what was the site? It was a fan-site for A Tale in the Desert, called www.egyptbay.com.
p.s. A tale in the desert is in open beta - check it out - VERY cool.
There is pressure to crack down on phony Whois data, but that problem is associated more with spam than with law enforcement.
As far as I know, no one has ever had their domain name taken away because of a content issue. So far, names haven't been used as a regulatory system.
More interesting is that Verisign is re-architecting the root server system to allow much faster changes and integration with Signalling System 7 for telephony. BIND is going away in the root servers. The new system will be closed-source, and will be more centrally controlled than the existing system.
The WC3 committee is nearly entirely corporate representatives. They may be technically skilled, but they are primarally corporate representatives, and should be trusted as much as that implies.
The recent debate about having the W3C approve proprietary "standards " still hasn't been satisfactorially resolved, and it nearly slipped by unnoticed.
As far as I am concerned, the W3C has lost a very large chunk of their respectability. Not all, they did (sort of) back down when people started talking seriously about creating a different standards group to replace them. (That's ethics in a modern corporate group.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
In other news today, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, was sued today by Yahoo! for trademark infringement. Apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu had the audacity -- despite being a well-known public figure -- to violate Yahoo!'s trademarks by registering his own personal website, Netanyahu.com. Apparently, Yahoo! is suing Netanyahu for taking advantage of the Yahoo! sound that Yahoo! worked so hard to market. Yahoo! claims that the sound of Netanyahu.com inherently takes advantage of Yahoo!'s trademarks.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
A non-politicized organization whose role is solely to provide and fund technical administration of the root servers worked well enough until Congress decided to do something about this. Why does the job of running a root or TLD server turn from one guy with a machine in his closet to a gigantic bureaucracy when government gets its hooks into it?
We might be better off using the courts to decide who gets what domain name... could they really do a worse job than WIPO? Of course, we could simply replace them with one person who awards the domain to the party with the biggest bank account and get almost identical results to the current system for a hell of a lot less money.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Once again, the shameless karmawhore posts his favourite site about ICANN. Just like last time, when it got me +5.
...
Anyway
http://www.paradigm.nu/icann/icannstage.html