Bank of America Buying Abusive Domain Names

Nite_Hawk writes "Bank of America has snapped up hundreds of abusive domain names for its senior executives and board members in what is being perceived as a defensive strategy against the future publication of damaging insider info from whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. According to Domain Name Wire, the US bank has been aggressively registering domain names including its board of directors' and senior executives' names followed by 'sucks' and 'blows.'"

Comments

Re:Just Making Themselves Look Worse

[cdrguru]

Listening to folks like the commenters here, it is clearly impossible for BofA to do this - everyone who owns a home has been impacted by Countrywide. If their home wasn't financed through Countrywide their neighbor's was and the drop in value of their neighbor's home tanked their home's value.

Roughly, according to National Association of Realtors, there are about 80 million single-family homes in the US today. The average value of all of these homes was around $170,000 and is now more like $100,000. Just having BofA pay every homeowner in the US $70,000 - all 80 million of them - would be 5.6 trillion dollars. If you blame banks for this mess, that is about what it would take. They don't have it.

One flaw with this is the banks may have participated, but the real problem is the bond rating agencies like Moody's. They are the ones that rated bonds backing subprime mortgages as AAA investment-grade bonds. Those bonds were then invested in by pension funds, municipalities and school districts. We haven't seen all of these bonds default yet, but they are going to - because the underlying mortgages are valueless and the rating agencies knew it. That pretty much means a lot of bankrupt pension funds, municipalities and school districts. Anyone that invested in AAA bonds exclusively is likely to get hit with this.

We haven't even seen the beginning of the collapse yet, but it is coming.

Re:Cheaper?

[drew30319]

IANAL (I'm currently on semester break from my last year of law school) but these types of websites are generally protected from many lawsuits due to their treatment as a form of free speech. Additionally under the CDA ( Communications Decency Act) ISPs are generally not considered the publishers of content posted by their users which provides them some degree of immunity.

Check out this Wired article for some highlights of the legal issues related to a "sucks" / "gripe" site: Legal Tips For Your 'Sucks' Site. Although it was written in 2000 and so might be a little outdated, it's worth reading for some interesting info.

Two important points: (1) The site operator should avoid any commercial activity (at all) on the gripe site and; (2) The site operator should ensure that visitors would never think that the site is in any way associated with the entity that is the focus of the gripe site. While a properly designed gripe site is generally safe from losing a lawsuit it's definitely best to check with an attorney to make sure that you're doing everything properly before heading down a potentially expensive road.