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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.
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
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.
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
People make money by registering domain names and selling them at inflated prices to companies you'd expect to own them.
You've just defined cybersquatting.
In this case, however, the goal doesn't seem to be to sell the domain at an inflated price, but instead to use it to get a point across. It does seem deceptive to register someone's name and then use it against them. I'm not sure it's all that unfair, however, as long as the party that owns the domain doesn't try to make the site there look like it belongs to the named party.
In this case, if Floyd is putting up a site that pretends to be Van Hollen's then that's deceptive, unfair, and probably slanderous. On the other hand, if www.vanhollen.com makes it clear that it's owned by Floyd, well that's at least less offensive and probably more reasonably "free speech."
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 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
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.
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.
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.