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Political Cybersquatting Or Free Speech?
Although plenty of people have purchased politically linked domain names as a form of protest in the past, now they're being used as part of organized campaigns. In Maryland's 8th district Congressional race, Republican candidate Charles R. Floyd purchased three domain names (VanHollen2004.com/net/org) that one might think would represent Democrat incumbent Rep. Chris Van Hollen. Instead, these sites carry criticism and a bit of mockery. Floyd says Van Hollen should've registered these domain names himself, and previously used the same tactic in the primary. Is this cybersquatting, or is it a fair expression of political speech?
Only the person with the most money will be able to hold the domain in any legal kerfuffle. Look at what happened to etoys.com.
And I would never vote for anyone who would do it.
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
What a despicable act. If I were in that area of the country, I wouldn't vote for that guy no matter what...he's definitely missing some morality genes someplace. Dummy.
The sites are about Van Hollen, so yeh, however if he hypes himself too much then it does become cyber squating, as he is using the domain name to mislead people alone.
This is just wrong. But I can't really think of a fair way of going about fixing the problem. Do you force people to give up their domain names because they are misleading? Tough to say.
It's clearly cybersquatting, but the real question is whether cybersquatting can/should be protected as freedom of speech.
Why not? Companies do this to each other at any chance they get. People make money by registering domain names and selling them at inflated prices to companies you'd expect to own them. Still when I go to a site that's not what I'm expecting e.g. looing for a proxy server it bugs me. So it's probably turning voters against him.
The site in question
I think people should look at this before commenting.
Story
Personally, I think our Government should be given a slap and made to hand the domains over. They've obviously done it as a form of political canvassing, and it's plain wrong.
fraudulant misrepresentation? Seriously, if I went to VanHollen2004.[com|net|org] I would expect to get something official for the 2004 campaign for Van Hollen, just the same as I would if i went to Bush2004.[com|net|org] or kerry2004.[com|net|org] (which both work). When you cant get ahead on your own merits, trash your competitors.
Having said that, I'm not thrilled with the tone U.S. politics has taken over the past 20 years or so with all the mud slinging, and I think this is (potentialy) just another few feet down that same slipery slope. I say potentially because I haven't seen the pages that were put up yet. It could be "honest politics" where one candidate is merely pointing out the voting record of another. However in this day and age I am inclined to doubt it.
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
I'm not in the US, so maybe this is fine there, but to me this sounds very much like libel (at least what I understand libel to mean :)).
:)
If it was simply the case that the Republican registered the sites, on which disparaging comments are made about a political opponent that would just be the sleazy but unfortunately acceptable face of politics. But since he registered domains which might reasonably (by my definition of reasonable anyhow) be taken to be connected with the Democrat and such disparaging statements are then made it sounds like a case could be made for unfairness, and whatever law that then entails.
Is this any different to registering www.microsoft.com (for example) and then writing Bill Gates hate-speech all over it?
Please note that I have no political stance to take on the issue of US politics, so please don't interpret anything I have said as a political attack on either candidate
Daar is nie 'n lepel nie
Cybersquatting is a fair expression of political speech.
Unless we actually enforce policies on what each top level (and lower) domain is named and contains, this sort of behaviour is just the extreme case of a broken/misfeatured system.
Personally, I think the cybersquatting shows a lack of class. I voted against Van Hollen in the last election, but I don't condone what his opponent is doing for one reason, in that you shouldn't work to silence your opponent in a political election in a republic.
Floyd is wrong on this one, big time. By attempting to suppress Van Hollen's website and ideas, he's tarnishing his own reputation.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
and almost as in beer. He's paying his two cents for the domain name, then saying his piece. Now he even gets a free plug on /., which will even give him a Google bump.
This is no more offensive than a TV ad, since I just press 'mute' if I don't want to hear it. In this case, I can just click away.
There may be some secondary backlash when Floyd supporters or undecideds go to VanHollen2004.org and find Floyd's rhetoric.
It doesn't harm anyone, since "LastName2004.org" is clearly political.
sigs, as if you care.
Any politician who claims that his opponent "votes for terrorists" instantly loses any credibility with me.
So long as the holder of the domain makes it clear he is not affiliated with the compaign that the URL would imply, I don't see a problem with it. Looking over this site, I think it's sufficiently clear that it's not actually being run by the candidate being mocked.
On the other hand, looking over this site and seeing how it's done make me dislike Floyd more than Van Hollen. But I'm not in that district, so...
I don't see how this is significantly different than www.gwbush.com (currently defunct), although gwbush.com was a bit cleverer.
Karl Rove once spent a lot of time and money buying up anti-Bush domain names, then redirecting them to the Bush webpage.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
http://unquietmind.com/cybersquat.html
What is your take on this sites view of the issue?
Chris Williams clw7500nc@gmail.com
Domain names aren't as important as they were in the 1990's. If you want to find something on the web, you go to a search engine now. I think that typing fooblab.com in the address bar and hoping for the best went out of style when porn sites starting parking redirect pages everywhere.
I mean, how far do we take this? Is van Hollen automatically entitled to *all* domains that might be remotely associated with his campaign? If van Hollen had himself purchased vanhollen2004.com, would we be having this conversation if the opponent has set up vanhollen-2004.com?
The website is real. It's not a "buy me for megabucks!" squatter. It says right up front that it's not an official Chris van Hollen site. There's nothing misleading about it, except for the little trick of the name itself.
Whether it's ethical, or "right," is another question entirely. But I'd rather these stupid tricks play out on the internet, where I can choose not to surf to a website, than on the streets, where all those damned (and illegal) campaign signs show up every year making it almost impossible to see around corners, if you're in a small car.
Are they afraid they might succumd to the lure of Fidel unless there's a ban on travel there? "Gee, Martha, I was this close to going to Cuba today, but thanks to God and the republicans, I was turned away at the airport. Just imagine, I might have seen gay clones going on a wild rampage of the streets of Havana. The horror!"
If that's the case, I hope he votes for a permanent travel ban for all citizens of the 8th district going anywhere, because quite frankly, we in the rest of the world don't want them to escape out of their little reservation.
Money for nothing, pix for free
As for cybersquatting, yes this definitely sounds like it. WIPO has the following criteria in determining if someone is cybersquatting.
- Is the domain name identical or confusingly similar to a trademark in which Complainant has rights?
- Does Respondent have no rights or legitimate interests in the domain name?
- Was the domain name registered and used in bad faith?
- Has the Complainant engaged in reverse domain name hijacking?
I think the main point in this is #3. A quote from a similiar issue talking about issue 3 is... (From here)Not exactly the same, but I think it has the same feel as this situation. I'd personally not be completely against this except for the quote "loyd says Van Hollen should've registered these domain names himself" that just makes me angry and (imo) is ridiculous. I use the same forum name on many forums (except this one) should I be forced to register it to stop someone from one day creating a hate-site about me?
I just took a look at the site, completely expecting to see mudslinging on the same level as a television commercial, but was pleasantly surprised.
While I doubt how much of the information is truthful, the page does inform you several times that it's not Van Hollen's official site and in fact they even link to his official site in the navigation menu.
View it while you can, though, because as candidates start taking the Internet seriously as a campaign medium, you won't see to many "civil" sites like these left.
I won't hold anything a politician's supporters do against him/her, because lots of reasonable people have crazy supporters. But if the person themselves is behind dirty tricks, I'd definitely hold that against them. Whether it's decisive depends on the other issues involved, but in my mind it's prima facie evidence that the person is more of a politician and demagoguge than an honest representative, and so they'd have to really excel in other areas to overcome that handicap and win my vote.
In this case, I don't think I'd ever vote for someone who used fear-mongering about "terrorism". There are legitimate worries, but it's our leaders' job to put them in perspective and calmly work to resolve them, not to work people up into a hysteria and play on them for political gain.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well, it probably is cybersquatting in the spirit of the law, but is it actually? The TLD has an integer included, not just the candidates name. Additionally, perhaps there are more than one person with that name. Of course, the content does disparage the candidate, which is a determining factor, but free speech is free speech. If the year was not included I'd say it was a 'slam dunk', but I guess this is just a free throw. Perhaps a new TLD (i know, i know) like ".anti" or ".con" - for people to express counter-points and still rank in page aggregators, would help. How about ".rep" or ".dem" or ".gdi" or ".grn"? Bottom line, it's a politician, I don't trust him already.
Stuff that matters.
Its one thing to register the domain names in question. Its another thing to actually have traffic to those domain names. In this case hes had an abundance of free publicity and the search engines/slashdot affect would do the site a world of good. Generally this wouldnt have been the case with out the large press/publicity/scam campaign that is currently occuring.
maybe I should register a few thousand political domain names.. then link them all to eachother.. create a post on slashdot mentioning it.. then change the content on the pages to something thats worth while.. then the search engines will redirect viagra requests.. oops i mean legit traffic to my site.
I keep reading a bunch of "definitions" of cybersquatting relying solely on the intent to sell a domain name back to its intended owner, but there's more to it than that according to US law:
According to the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, cybersquatting is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.
Yes, intent to profit has a lot to do with it, but bad-faith intent is all that's necessary for such activity to be considered cyber-squatting. Punishments are only much worse for those intending to profit from it. Besides, since when is profit limited to money? The additional attention via registering your political opponent's namesake domain name allows extra persuasion of voters, and that's a profit... or else, what is your definition of profit?
First, he shouldn't have .com or .net, since he isn't a commercial entity or network provider....
Second, having said that, the right to have a domain name isn't the same thing as the right to deceive people. Sure, he has the right to the domain name, assuming that he registered it and didn't register something that was trademarked. Even so, he does _not_ have the right to use that domain (or any domain) to try to decieve people into believing that the material represents someone else. I haven't looked at the web site in question, but I get the impression that it is not deceptive. Thus, no problem.
If he violates anything as important as this, he can't be trusted with anything smaller like Congress.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I really believe the next generation of search engines/browsers will make remembering URLs unnecessary, fixing the current problems with cybersquatting.
As an analogy, when I was growing up, I could remember four or five dozen phone numbers of friends/family/whatnot. Now, I could list about three. I would speculate that my great-grandmother could do the same with mailing addresses, yet now my mom would be lost without using mail merge for her Christmas cards.
I, personally, don't know exactly how we are going to jump past bookmarks and Google, but I have no doubt some creative UI engineer with figure it out, since the same problem has been solved before.
Cybersquatting is not really to biggest issue, either. The more basic problem is commonality of names. What does the company 'Delta' mean to you? Travel? Electronics? Faucets? Power tools? It's like asking what 'Dave Smith' means. There are many in the phonebook, but only one or two are significant to you and your cellphone knows the difference.
What we have today is like the first generation of speeddial. That improved, and so will browsers. It won't be long before your browser can make a decent guess at where you actually want to go. (No, that is not a Microsoft plug...they just happened to hire a good slogan writer. "Where do you want to go today" is a very futuristic question.)
The site had the reverse effect on me - it was poorly constructed, including numerous typos.
The accusations just seem silly - "Votes for: terrorists"?? If you really want to put together a site like that, you should at least substantiate the accusations.
After reading through that crap, I went and looked at Van Hollen's real website, and was actually impressed with his biography and Congressional resume.
The guy who registered the site has the right to do so, I think -- he's just being stupid and seeming petty to the voters.
There ought to be a law. Won't somebody please think about thinking about the children?
It's both... the idea of free speech guarantees that both and idiot or an asshole can say or do what they want to do as long as it doesn't impede the rights of another.
Since, in this case, the candidate doesn't have the right to any domain he wishes except through normal, fair and public channels, he loses. He really should have been savy enough to consider purchasing domains that benefit him instead of this rival.
I am a candidate for State Representative (Green Party) and the first thing I did when I decided to run was to register a bunch of domains to minimize chances of this happening to me.
Unfortunately it is impossible to think of all the possibilities, and the more you think of the more it costs.
There is some sort of tradeoff and risks you have to take in this sort of battle. The campaign doesn't really have a lot of time to worry about shutting these things down (with election deadlines looming), and certainly as a third party candidate we don't have any money.
Also, web sites are still not terribly effective ways to market to most voters. For example, in the district I'm running in, there are 110,000 voters (plus who knows how many new ones?).
My website draws maybe 100 hits on a good day.
Even if I got that hit rate for an entire year, and even if we assumed they were all hits from people in my district, that would still leave over 95% of the voters who didn't bother to check it out.
An even smaller percentage might hit anti-me campaign sites....
O=='=++
The courts have ruled: you may mock politicians, but not televangelists.
I'd disagree with your specific restrictions. However, I'd suggest requiring that any such political site include a "Paid for by the Joe Blah for Senate Campaign" on each page, with a link to a web page version of the usual "I'm the candidate, and I approve this message". If put up by a PAC, use "Paid for by Citizens Against Jim Mumble", with a link to a page stating the group's charter, directorship, and business office. If put up by a private citizen, "Paid for by BillyBob Doe", linked to a page informing people that they are doing this as a private citizen, saying whether they are a registered voter, and if so, noting if they are registered in a precinct that will vote on this election.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I think it would be funnier if he linked to the Van Halen site.
Maybe he's just a gigolo.
I'm just a gigolo and everywhere I go
People know the part I'm playin'
Paid for every dance, sellin' each romance
Ooh, what they're sayin?
There will come a day, and youth will pass away
What'll they say about me?
When the end comes I know they'll say just a gigolo
And life goes on without me
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
http://wipo.int/ is typically who you go through to resolve probelms with domains, however someone's name isn't really "intellectual property"
It also costs upwards of $2000 to start a dispute, which really isn't a problem for a Dem. or Rep. party member, however they would have a hard time proving a name is intellectual property.
As long as it's not libel (printed slander, aka lies) the domain owner should be fine, even if he does need a lawyer.
Someone ready the EFF batphone!
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
If you're rich and powerful and have enough money to sue the people using your name, it's cybersquatting.
If you're a poor nobody, who cares?
When I'm not impersonating a glorified light bulb holder online, my name is Deborah. I'd love to use Deborah.com or at least see it used for something other than pr0n. But I'm a poor nobody, so who gives a shiat?
The name is also biblical (which few people know, but Deborah was a tough enough chic back in the B.C. days to rate a couple of chapters in the male dominated Good Book). Now all Debbie is known for is the mark she made on Dallas.
I guess that's part of the point as well though. If you're known well enough for people to be googling you or think that your name should equal dotcom somewhere in the netaverse, then maybe just maybe, the person who feels they're being maligned should be master of their own domain.
The funny thing is that this question didn't come up when the site http://whitehouse.org/ opened or when http://bush2004.com (or .net or .org) opened. This just doesn't sound like an agrument on principle. I'm so used to seeing sites like this, that I've really stopped caring. It's the same as the X-sucks.com domains, but deceitfully subtle. This is just another case of the net not being the most reliable place to find information.
The real answer in the case of campaigns is to set up a campaign site at local, state and federal levels that serves as a (very) small site or forwarding service to the candidates' official site. It should be a service provided to anyone on the ballot in a race. (Put third party rants below.) If you go any where else, you could get the candidate's site, a supporter's site, a basher site or even a beer company site.
I call it just being an asshole.
The domain used to belong to the Representative, but he (or his dormant campaign staff) forgot to renewal.
You may not agree with it, but I have my rights and having a easy-to-remember domain name certaintly helps people find it. I make no representation that it's "Duke's" website.
I don't see much difference between this and Michael Moore's F-9/11 movie. Both are designed to mislead and misinform.
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
The tactics you mention are part of a broader set of activities known as voter suppression and they are standard fare for winning elections. Besides telling people to vote on the wrong date or implying there will be negative consequences to voting, parties use (sometimes) very strongarm tactics to reduce the turnout of their opponent's constituency.
In Florida in 2000, the Republican-controlled state registrar's office 'purged' the voter rolls of ineligible voters. This has been shown to include as many as 8,000 eligible voters who simply had the same name as a felon. While voter roll purges were done on a county-by-county basis, the overwhelming majority of people striken from the list were from counties more likely to vote Deomcratic.
Redistricting can be another form of voter suppression. Look at a district map of Texas and you will notice some bizarre gerrymandered shapes. The purpose here is to split constituencies into smaller groups where the value of their vote will be diluted.
M