Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Disputes, Clones, Audio
Needed: One referee. Quixotic1 writes "A small company I work for has discovered that a domain name has been registered with their U.S.-trademarked (since 1980) name. Requests to the owner of the site (a U.S. citizen) have gone unanswered, so we're now moving on to filing an ICANN dispute. There was a query last week about inexpensive alternatives to the $1000+ UDRP arbiters. The discussion ended up revolving around whether the author had a valid claim or not, but I'd still like to know -- are there inexpensive alternatives?"
I bet there's money to be made if someone can come up with cheaper means of settling such disputes.
Store in the ammunition box. leonbrooks writes "Recently, images from a presentation by Microsoft Belgium were published on the web. The presentation made some startling (for Microsoft) concessions to Open Source, then set about FUDding the GPL into the ground. I whacked together a point-by-point answer to the anti-GPL FUD. Happy linking ..."
Tithe 10 percent. Luke Francl writes "Inspired by Lawrence Lessig's OSCON remarks, Lessig's Challenge is a way for people concerned by the attempts by the entertainment industry to close off the net to fight back. The challenge is to spend more on those who fight for the open network than you do on its enemies. Since it appeared on Slashdot last month, 10 people have joined me and we've raised over $2300 for good causes (organizations like the EFF, the ACLU, the FSF, along with free software/open source programmers and online artists). And that's just the ones I know about! Cory Doctorow wrote to tell me that many people were inspired by the challenge to join the EFF. ... Check out the list of suggested recipients."
Like obsidian, and coal, and dirt ... salimfadhley writes "Today BBC Radio 4 began serialising Phillip Pullman's popular "Dark Materials" trilogy. The beeb will be broadcasting one episode per week, with a RA stream of the latest episode that can be found on the promotional site. You can find "The Golden Compass" (called "Northern Lights" in Europe) on the website now. This stream will be replaced with episode 2 next Saturday.
The Dark Materials series was originally intended as children's fiction, however owing to excellent storytelling and a significantly darker theme than Harry Potter, has done rather well in U.S. and UK adult market.
The central premise of the series is that God is evil, a celestial impostor who pretends to have created the universe and who so intensely hates flesh and blood that he wants people to live a repressed, joyless existence. Unsurprisingly this theme has upset fundamentalist Christians."
Unfamiliar? Read the Slashdot review of the trilogy.
The clones I meet are mostly in pairs. PizzaFace writes "The Washington Post reports that the Raelian clone claim echoes a hoax of 25 years ago. And while we have better technology now for testing the claim quickly, there is still room for deception, and some people don't trust the science (and pseudoscience) reporter the Raelians appointed to test their claim."
The domain name is not a trademark registry. You have no moral claim to the domain name. Your only hope is throwing $1000 at ICANN, who will happily rule in your favor.
It's located here.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
> "A small company I work for has discovered that a domain name has been registered with their U.S.-trademarked (since 1980) name. Requests to the owner of the site (a U.S. citizen) have gone unanswered, so we're now moving on to filing an ICANN dispute. There was a query last week about inexpensive alternatives to the $1000+ UDRP arbiters. The discussion ended up revolving around whether the author had a valid claim or not, but I'd still like to know -- are there inexpensive alternatives?"
Here's a cheap, effective solution: deal with it. The current owner has as much right to it as you do (or more, since ownership is 9/10 of the law).
Try
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The premise of the Dark Materials triology sounds a LOT like the root of the Gnostic Heresey (where new age "gnosticism" comes from, actually.)
In the early days of Christianity, there were three major sects--the Christians, the Jews, and the Gnostics. The Jews were, well, jewish folk who lived as jews but thought that Jesus was the Messiah (sorta like "Jews for Jesus.") The Christians were the to-the-lions folks we all know and love, and the Gnostics--well, the gnostics are why the strong central church formed, and why the Inquisition was so harsh.
The Gnostic Heresy, as I understand it:
There was a God, and Jesus Christ was his living son--but God_the_Creator is not God-the-burning-bush-that-spoke-to-moses. Sometime after creation, a spirit called the Demiurge usurped control over creation, lied to the jews, and pretty much acted the way Christians might imagine "Satan" acting.
The Demiurge created flesh, and so flesh is flawed, and all of humanity is doomed to damnation, save for the accidental banishment from heaven of the goddess/archangel Sophia, who apparantly had no small part in Jesus Christ showing up and mascarading as a person for so many years.
The Gnosic Heresy, btw, was propagated by a series of "revelations" about the faith, sort of like the popular image of how a witch's coven is organized. It was stamped out rather freverently in the early days of Christianity, and hasn't been a going concern as a religion for a great many years.
[from the link:] > Known in the OSS community as a "viral" licence.
As the author points out, and as others of us have stated repeatedly: the GPL isn't viral, it's recursive. I've got lots of non-GPL software on my home system, and none of it has ever "caught" the GPL.
The simple rule is: if A is GPL'd and B is derived from A, then B is GPL'd. The rule is "recursive" or "transitive", but not "viral". The OSS community would do itself a favor to quit calling it "viral". (Though in fact the term seems to be more common among complainers than among GPLers, despite what the quoted MS document says.)
Hint to Microsoft: if you don't want to GPL your software, don't derive it from GPL'd software. It's as simple as that -- at least for people who aren't being obtuse willfully.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'm not sure what frustrates me more: the fact that the media has been hyping the Raelians' claim of a human clone without any evidence whatsoever, or the fact that the media even seems to realize that they're being silly reporting this BUT DO IT ANYHOW! If the media had any self-respect, they would have learned from the previous hoax and not be covering this new Raelian claim so much. However, they seem perfectly content to give this UFO cult a world stage to prance around on. It's almost as though the media is a semi-willing participant in this (what I assume will be a) clone fraud. Oh sure, they claim they're just reporting "important news". But let's face it: it's really just a bunch of UFO nuts who have made an incredible claim without any evidence whatsoever. This is news? I think the media is just happy to cover this because they know they can milk this for awhile regardless of whether the story is true or not. So sad that our media is willing to whore themselves like this just to entertain the masses.
GMD
watch this
Register all trademarks in Turkmenistan... that way, they'll end in ".tm"; you'll be happy that your trademark has been "exported to cyberspace", and we'll be happy that we can ignore you.
-- Terry
I find it said that increasingly stories labelled as "news" are obviously editorialized descriptions of recent events. Take for a few quotes from the article about the Dark Materials triology:
and
How can this kind of stuff even pretend to be "news"? Is it just because the story is talking about Christians that it gets away with this kind of writing around here?
Forget the whales - save the babies.
I bet there's money to be made if someone can come up with cheaper means of settling such disputes.
How damnably ironic can Timothy be (without trying to be)? The whole point of the $1000 fee is that there's money to be made. You know how much money? Right about $1000, minus expenses. *sigh*
The reality is, the $1000 fee goes towards two main purposes, neither of which is profit. The first is to cover a relatively expensive process (yes, flame on, I know that you would arbitrate and manage claims for free). The second reason is to provide a barrier to entry. "Barrier to entry" sounds evil to most knee-jerk thinkers, but this one is a good barrier. Trust me, I would file claims against every company I didn't like in the world if the fee was only $1. I would have fun with the system. So would everyone else. The $1000 price tag makes me think a bit more before I challenge for a domain name that is "rightfully" mine.
I'll settle any such disputes for $500. Each party agrees to abide by the decision and hold me blameless.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
All you have to do is: don't be hung up on your domain name being identical to your trademark name. Almost nobody's is.
If your trademark is non-descriptive (e.g. nothing about the name "Levi" indicates they sell jeans) then it might really collide with someone else somewhere else in this big world. At best, it might be ambiguous and vague. Maybe combine your trademark with something descriptive, and you could even end up with a better domain name than your vague trademark. (e.g. Which is a better domain name: levi.com or levijeans.com?)
Or if it absolutely must be the same, then use a different TLD. You probably don't have a TLD in your 20-year-old trademark (e.g. that company in Redmond is not named "Microsoft Dot Com") so you had little hope of getting an exact match on the whole string anyway. The original purposes for many of the TLDs are long forgotten and unenforced, so just pick any of 'em, whatever looks pretty. Whatever. You might be surprised at how many websites are not actually hosted in Tuvala.
If there's no dispute, then there's no expense. You can't get more inexpensive than that.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Actually, why not abandon the internet? I am working on a replacement after all... I would like to have been able to keep the internet for myself and those like me, but it was stolen from all of us years ago. I'm sorry, but I don't want to be living on an internet "reservation" (apologies to native americans) which just happens to be only those parts no corporations wanted.
Oh, and since I never made this obvious... I not only don't mind the idea of alternate Meta's, I think it would be good to have several distinct/seperate Meta's in existence. So if you think you have what it takes, build your own!
Try reading what he said. He didn't say that he had forbidden his daughter from reading the books, just that he had declined to give them to her. Just as the daugher has a right to choose which books she wants to read, the father has a right (and obligation, IMO) to exercise his judgment about which books he wants to give her. My niece is about that age, and I support her right to read Mein Kampf if that's what she really wants to do. But when it came time to buy her a Christmas present, I decided that I had better things to spend my money on and bought her Cardcaptor Sakura instead.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
A small company I work for has discovered that a domain name has been registered with their U.S.-trademarked (since 1980) name. Requests to the owner of the site (a U.S. citizen) have gone unanswered, so we're now moving on to filing an ICANN dispute.
People like you worry me. You didn't say they had any kind of a web site, only that they registered the domain.
I hope you meant that "they had a web site up that might confuse our customers" or "we have a famous mark and they are diluting it" or something like that. Not just that your trademark is stored on some hard drive at the domain registrar database and you really would like it for yourself.
I have a couple domains with short non-word names that I registered many years ago. For a while I had a stupid "hello, here are links to my friends' home page" kind of thing, but decided I would just use them for email, which I do.
And I occasionally wonder if some low-life that wants the name is going sue me (or even worst, arbitrate me) just because he wants the domain, and not because I'm actually affecting his business. In court that would be easy to win, but in arbitration I would probably lose.
Heck, that low-life might be YOU (though I doubt it since my contact info is up-to-date and I haven't seen any messages about them).
Please, register your domain in .biz or something for now and don't sue this guy unless he is actually *infringing on your trademark* or he bought the domain *in bad faith*. I don't know how generic the term in question is, but if it's something generic like "ProComputers.com", I doubt it's bad faith.