Slashdot Mirror
Jail Time for Misleading Domain Names
Bootsy Collins writes "The Miami Herald is running a
story
on the first-ever prison sentencing (and, for that matter, prosecution and conviction) under the Federal Truth in Domain Names Act. This act, combined into the larger
Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today Act (PROTECT) of 2003, made it a violation of U.S. Federal law to use a misleading domain name with the intent to deceive someone into viewing obscene material -- larger penalties if attempting to so mislead minors, but up to two years even if adults are the object. In the case in question, a man was convicted for registering thousands of domain names which were close misspellings of popular web sites for kids. Attempting to surf to those sites would redirect to a site entitled 'Dorm Sex Party.' Before being arrested, the convicted typosquatter made about a million dollars for the referrals." He's been on Slashdot before.
On one hand, typing a URL and getting a "BUY THIS PAGE" page annoys the bejesus out of me.
On the other hand, going to jail for setting up a website seems....excessive. Surely just taking it down and a fine would be enough?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have absolutely no problem if those sites were adult sites. My issue with these dudes is that they are delibrately TRICKING kids into viewing the porn.
Kudos to the authorities for clamping down on this dude.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From the article: "Zuccarini admitted in court documents that one reason he preyed on websites popular among children was ''because children are more likely than adults to make spelling errors and to mis-type website addresses,'' prosecutors said.
If he had made the statement that he misspelled the domain names to attract adults, thats one thing, but in his case intention is everything. He should of received 30 years.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
"And can you be fined for "offending" someone with content that you consider acceptable ?"
Probably, thanks to things like Community Standards. Sadly, we seem to live in a world of hyper-sensitive crybabies and professional victims.
The thing that worries me about the law is this: what constitutes "use"? What constitutes "using" a misleading domain name? What this guy did surely does. But what about posting a link in which you try to trick people into seeing the goatse man by using a yahoo.com redirect. Is that using a misleading domain name (yahoo.com) to manipulate someone into viewing obscene content? The law itself does not say "use = registering a domain name and setting up a website at". I don't have any problem with this guy getting prosecuted; but I worry that the law is so vague that half the trolls on
My mom has a German Shepherd that learns faster than this for godssakes.
A lot of things we silly humans do is motivated by money...so take away any motivation!
Make it two million.
Oh sure... Someone could argue that partybeef.com could be typed in by a 6 year old looking for snacks for her friends, (not a real site, so use your imagination...) Next thing you know the site operator ends up as a piece of party beef in a federal prison because someone decided it was obviously misleading.
What is obvious to me is that the next step will involve going after anyone who puts objectionable material on the net without it being clearly labeled, registered, and hidden behind a credit card required brown paper wrapper page.
And what about unintentionally misleading Google results? When will they hold us liable for that? This one actually disturbs me a little.
That's just really gross. Really, if I was a porn site provider and some guy was redirecting to my site through kiddie bits, I wouldn't be very happy. Primarily because they're taking my money and just throwing it all over the place.
Beyond even the issue of being a scum bag with arguably scummy people, using sites popular with children with a method that drags in more kids than adults. I think this makes him the kingof the scumbags.
Okay, what's this hypothetical law you're supporting. "It is illegal to use a word that someone else may use, if they may not want to see your site"? Or is it "You cannot use a word on your site unless you have a well-considered topical essay on the subject indicated by that word"? Or is it "As the author of a site, you are responsible for how third party software decides to present your URL"? Please do clarify, I'm quite curious.
I've had this sig for three days.
I, unlike most /. posters, can comment on prison based on experience. I have spent time there, as an inmate.
It's my firm belief that sending non-violent criminals to prison
does more harm than good.
There are many other ways to punish someone, besides sending them to prison : home confinement, community service, probation, fines, are all better options for a large percentage of offenders.
Prison should only be the punishment of last resort. It is far from a solution, and the notion that sending some people to
prison acts to prevent others from committing crimes is childishly naive, and doesn't stand up to statistical scrutiny.
Sending non-violent offenders to prison is only one more
in a long series of huge mistakes made by the US government.
Of course, this will not be news to intelligent, well-read people.
All you "law and order" types need to consider this : when someone is sent to prison, unless they die there or have a life sentence, they WILL eventually be released. And when they are,
the rest of society will very likely pay some sort of price for the damage this person has incurred while in prison. Thus, society is
screwing itself by sending non-violent offenders ( or offenders who don't present an actual danger to society ) to prison. Far better to keep these people OUT of prison and punish them in some other way. NOTE : I do believe that crimes *should* be punished, but the point is, it's possible to punish people without
permanently damaging them, that sending someone to prison is quite likely to result in permanent damage.
Any of you out there who haven't done time are not sufficiently informed to comment on the advisability of sending non-violent offenders to prison. You can of course write what you like, but keep in mind that your thoughts might have the same level of
validity as those of a man describing what pregnancy feels like.
Oh, and the invasion of Iraq was about preserving access to oil,
and the "anti-gay marriage" stance the current administration has embraced is an attempt to pander to the religious right
and gain votes.
Don't let YOUR government sucker you into accepting policies that end up screwing YOU.
Thanks, and good evening.
That's what I've been wondering about. According to an article over at The Register he got from ten to twenty-five cents from the porno sites for every re-direction. I realise that the more you make on one customer the more you can spend per potential customer but how many kids that mis-spell Disney or Teletubby or whatever just happen to have access to a credit card or checking account number and how many parents looking for something for their kids are going to decide to postpone that search so that they can buy access to materials they probably won't be sharing with those kids? If the last step is "Profit!" the next to last is a big ol' question mark.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
This is a sick person. He targeted children. Not only that, but if people can make a stink about Lindows because it sounds too much like windows and causes confusion in adults at computer stores, then how can they let this slide where he tricked children to watching porn? What the hell is this guys value system? Making 10 cents off each child he tricks to going to a porn site? Was the 10 cents worth it for him? I would like to hear what he has to say in prision, when he is forced to look at jail porn, live and first hand.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
So really at the end of the day this person has pocketed $1 million USD for 30 months jail. No wonder he pleded guilty. I would trade a short holiday to jail for that....!!!
America is becoming less & less "American" all the time.
The government is -not- your mom. They shouldn't be required to take these kinds of measures because some soccer mom saw her child get re-directed to some hot fisting action.
If there's any 'america' left in Americas geeks, some smart kid will capitalize on soccer mom paranoia; by writing an app which catalogs all these re-directs and makes sure that the user never sees the end result of that offensive URL. Then sell it for mucho coin. Yay for Free Enterprise and not Socialism!
I was quite disappointed when ICANN did not set up a ".xxx" domain. The purveyors of smut in the past has gladly taken up the X or XXX rating so that customers could be sure of the quality of the product that they were getting. I am sure that the internet generation would be more than happy to do the same thing because the .xxx domain would tend to drive traffic to their sites.
Oh, well, another reason to get rid of ICANN.
Isn't theory a great place? Everything works in theory.
I guess I can't support America's paranoia about its own sexuality.
hah. the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. first, the consequences never, i repeat, never stop potential criminals who decided to do a crime. even death penalty don't.
second, in the jail, criminals learn quite a lot interesting things and they meet other criminals. and after they are released they have more than enough knowledge and contacts to do much much bigger crimes.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
There are so many things wrong with this. First of all, I didn't read the article. But that's not even important. My opinions matter way more than me having to read some article on Slashdot.
Number one, the fact that somebody is registering domain names that are spell-alikes of real domains is questionable. The fact that they get linked to some porno site is sleazy. The part where he made a million dollars helps draw things into focus a bit, though. Before that I thought this guy was some sort of pedophile psycho. But apparently he's just trying to make a buck off the Internet, and who here hasn't tried that. There are plenty who have cyber-succeeded and not been sleazy, sure. But it's the Wild West, baby!
But does this particular sleazy incident warrant Congresional action? It seems to me like it's only a handful of people registering these URLs. Heck this guy must have done quite a few to net $1mil. (Maybe I'd know that if I read the article. Who cares.)
I'd like to know what sort of research Congress did before passing the PROTECT Act of 2003. Did they attempt to finger this dude? Apparently not or he surely would have been dragged before some committe, somewhere. Or did Congress hear horror stories of kids trying to find Pokemon on line only to find something that made them ask their parents uncomfortable questions.
Speaking of which, what the *fuck* are kids doing on the Internet in the first place? That is a dumb idea, it's neglectful for parents to let kids surf without watching over their shoulder. Of course the flip side to that is there should be some sort of decency standards, and without a doubt the Internet has been wrestling with that since, well, how long has alt.talk.abortion been around? For that matter I'm pretty sure I signed the "save goatse" petition.
Okay, I just read the article, it doesn't really answer any questions. I'd love to know what he had that got him the "one count of possessing child pornography."
You know what, this law sucks. This basically makes registering a domain name that might be mistaken for disney a federal crime. How about fuckdisney.com? Couldn't that fall under this umbrella? I thought that any company with half a brain would just register all the spell-alikes anyway; it's cheap and there's no way they'll get the wrong message then. This stinks like the 1998 NET Act, which made copyright infringement a federal crime too. What the fuck, Congress, is there no room for civil proceedings anymore? Let's just make everything a crime? Do you know how much money that is going to cost? We'll need a ton more federal lawyers, and prison space once you're done with the trials.
Criminalizing shady behavior is a slippery slope. It's perfectly legal to lie, in fact that right is pretty much guaranteed by the First Amendment. We should be working towards a society where issues like cybersquatting and redirecting kids to porn sites don't require contfrontational, litigational, Congressional intervention. We should be able to work this out without some bureaucrat deciding it's time we take heed of the power he wields.
The guy should have been aware of this law and just registered all these domain names from his villa in the Mediterranean, free of Uncle Sam's long arm. Aside from that, he probably deserves the 2.5 years he gets, even if the law he broke is totally for the benefit of Disney, Nickelodeon, and a few other exploitative corporation that prey on the young. They don't sell sex, but they pump a hell of a lot of sugar into the veins of young America. Why one is reprehensible and the other is condoned is anybody's guess.
Law is a complex issue and many decisions on the constitutionality of an issue will be based upon a collection of arguments, from previous decisions to simple matters of practicality to specifics defined by the constitution itself. Arguing that the constitution says nothing about a woman's right to an abortion directly and therefore that a woman doesn't have a right to an abortion is a little like arguing that the proof of Fermat's Last Theorum is mathematically invalid because you can't get to it with a one line proof involving addition and subtraction.
Constitutional scholars tend, when being critical about the Roe vs Wade ruling, to be concerned about a small part of it, namely the issues over whether abortion can be banned in the various trimesters of pregnancy. The rest of the ruling is usually considered watertight by all but the most ideological.
Probably none, because I see little will in Congress and the Senate for defiling the constitution with an amendment that takes rights away, so it'll never get as far as being passed and ratified.You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The courts regularly overturn the constitution. Where in the world did they find the "right" for a woman to have an abortion? Did they totally ignore the 10th amendment?
The the greatest genius of the framers of the Constitution is that they founded our country upon powerful general principles of freedom and equality. In many cases they themselves were not ready to face the full implications of those principles, yet in a truly subversive act, they gave those principles the ultimate power of law.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, although clearly recognizing the evil of slavery, was unable to give up his own slaves. Yet he helped to found our country general principles that would ultimately make slavery untenable.
These powerful principles were like time bombs in our Constitution, and it was left to the logicians of our society--the judges--to work out the full implications of those principles. It has taken over two hundred years to do so, and we are not done yet.
There is a danger that we will turn away from those deep principles. There have been attempts in the past, such as the effort to amend the Constitution to make burning the flag an exception to the protection of free speech. We are seeing this again, with the effort to amend the Constitution to prohibit states from allowing gay marriage.
If we ever do start to amend the Constitution so as to limit people's rights instead of expanding them, I believe that our nation will have turned a corner from which there is no returning, and will have begun a repudiation of those principles of freedom and equality which our founders fought so hard to establish.
But we've approached that brink and turned back before. I can only hope that we will continue to do so.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.