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Porn-Industry Outsiders Fear 'Shakedown' In .XXX TLD
The long-debated .XXX top-level domain opens this week; reader SonicSpike sends a snippet from the Washington Times about what may turn into a hornet's nest of anger at how the new domain is being used: "Some adult-entertainment companies are balking at the entire scheme, saying that ICM Registry LLC, which is overseeing .xxx registrations worldwide, does not have permission to sell the .xxx version of trademarked names and brands. In addition, the Florida-based company is raising eyebrows — and charges of 'shakedown' — by trying to get non-porn companies to pay to prevent their brands from being registered as .xxx sites. After all, what maker of baby food or children's movies, for example, would want to have sites such as gerber.xxx or disney.xxx floating around the Internet?"
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as 'disney.com' ? the porn that goes in there is totally different than the regular porn tho - they are fucking children's minds. still, its xxx in another sense.
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Does Gerber have any idea what big appetites adult-baby fetishists must have? Ka-ching!
After all, what maker of baby food or children's movies, for example, would want to have sites such as gerber.xxx or disney.xxx floating around the Internet?
They could spin it advantageously in the end...somehow.
I don't see how this is any different than worryabout trademark registrations for .edu, .net, .org, or the country code TLDs.
If you really want to protect your trademark, you have to register an awful lot of TLDs just to cover one variation on a name.
Fortunately the convention seems to be that whoever registers for a .com, first implicily has the rights to that name in other .TLDs.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Its already against the law to make adult web sites with names to fool children. So making a Disney.xxx is already against the law. But since criminals break laws I'm sure someone will give it a try.As far as the other stuff well they have no one to blame but themselves. They were given the opportunity to self regulate and they failed very badly.
Jack of all trades,master of none
There is a clause that allows companies to register their own trademark domain for a steep discount if they don't intend to use it for adult content. A couple hundred bucks to a mega corp isn't a shakedown.
There is too much centralized control over the Internet. This allows governments to stomp it out, destroy it, shut it down, prevent information from being disseminated. Wikileaks? Shut it down. Social media used to organize people? Shut it down. Porn? Well, it's a good pretense for shutting down even more Internet to ever more people. Darknet, private Internet separated from main pipes at first through security and eventually physically, that's what will have to be done. Even if old BBSs with dial up will have to be brought back on line, what are you going to do? What are you going to do when everything is shut down by the governments?
That paper is about as serious as the Daily News.
Submissions linking to it have no place here.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
gerber are obviously just typosquatting gerbil.xxx, a domain which I expect to retail for plenty.
I'd like to see a scheme like the .xxx tld work well- simplifying things for people who don't want to encounter internet smut without error-prone filter setups and without futile attempts to keep that kind of stuff off the web entirely. But it looks like this is being done in the worst way possible.
Exorbitant registration fees will make it so this will never serve its intended purpose- most smut will be hosted on normal tlds just to save on fees. And the claimed "shakedown" racket makes no sense. If there's going to be porn which (ab)uses your trademark, it's not like registering a domain will wipe it out or even make it significantly harder to find. The best route for normal businesses would be to just ignore everything under that tld. It's not like the old whitehouse.com problem- if somebody says "I went to gerber.xxx and was SHOCKED to see what was there! For shame!" there's the easy rejoinder "What exactly were you doing looking up gerber.xxx, and what did you expect to find on an .xxx domain? Why would you think that's affiliated with us at all?" But this greedy registry wants to wring extra dough out of people by playing on their trademark paranoias.
I continue to wonder whether any greedy porn king would have the slightest interest in "gerber" or "disney". If they had found a market in that, we'd already have Gerber_XXX.com or XDisney (like Xhamster). The brew-ha-ha may actually create a "Streisand Effect" causing domain squatters to go register domains they otherwise would not have considered (something I tried labelling the "streisand.xxx effect").
"The Streisand effect is a primarily online phenomenon in which an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Gently reply
Companies should be purchasing these and then exploiting them as a way to market toward 20-45 year old males looking for these URLs. There are tactful ways to take advantage even if you are Gerber.
– Ternus
What's the #1 thing that all tech guys have in common? Facial hair. #2 would be pr0n.
Important to note, It's $200/yr right now to pre-register 1 domain name.. it's not like it's $8-$9. Even after pre-registration when it goes open to anyone to buy it's still $99/yr per domain. I just want to know how someone is GIVEN a business to manage like that. It's going to created record profits for almost no work at the expense of other legit adult and mainstream businesses. Sounds like someone got a kickback to allow this to me.
ICANN should make a few simple rules (i.e. easy to understand and to code). Good examples could be
{domain}.com OR {domain}.xxx, but not both
{domain}.TLD (original list) OR {domain}.(arbitrary TLD), but not both.
These could be used to filter out online registrations. Obviously some sort of exceptions will crop up (playboy.com and playboy.xxx), which could be handled by certifying that the owner of the first registration is filing for the second. Registrars could charge extra for this manual red-tape exception.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
A grainy 8mm film of a Disney Snow White doing a strip tease. There used to be a copy on the web, but I'm not surprised that it disappeared. Maybe somebody could put up a rapidshare file??
Fifteen years ago, .org, .net and .com made sense and by and large companies registered the domain that made sense for their business.
Then businesses decided that letting someone else own, say, cocacola.net didn't make a lot of sense from a branding point of view. (Which is entirely true; the domain system was devised with little thought given to commercial interests or how they'd likely play out).
Today, most businesses of any size can be counted on to register every TLD that is even remotely well-known - if only to ensure that a porn site in their name does not appear under that domain. Registrars encourage this by heavily advertising every TLD they can think of. So we now get a mad rush of registration every time this happens.
In other news, Verisign is trying to get non-stupid companies to pay to prevent their brands from being registered as company-is-stupid.com sites. After all, what serious book publisher or university, for example, would want to have sites such as amazon-is-stupid.com or mit-is-stupid.com floating around the Internet?
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Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It's been 31 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
31 minutes since my last comment? I hope I am not overwhelming the infrastructure here!
Gerber means "to vomit" in french. Since .xxx is not language specific and vomit has a small but very dedicated and well-paying porn following (really, it does), I have every right to register that name and use it to sell vomit-porn to the francophone market. As long as I am not using the name in a way that would lead to trademark confusion (which would be pretty hard to argue), Gerber should just butt out.
If they ever wanted to create American hentai films, that would be the logical place.
hehehe you said butt
I have a lot of "smut" like domains. I would say, I own about 50 non-variant domain names; non-variant bob.com and bobby.com count as one. Maybe a solid 35 of those are no doubt fine domains for a smut site. All for personal use, because I'm a geek and feel I ought to own my own domains, I do not make money from them or anything, I don't even check the mail going to many of them so even if someone wanted to buy one for millions I never saw the offer, nor do I want to see such an offer honestly. To me, if you sit on a domain just to sell it that's questionable... but to sit on a cool domain to connect to IRC with or have an interesting email address, to me that's not a bad thing.
Years ago, when this whole .xxx thing came out, I was actually thinking of making a few of my domains into full-blown sites. So, I purchased the .xxx variants of some of my 'smut' domains and sat on them for a while. This was at a time when Firefox and IE needed a special plugin to visit these strange TLDs remember? Anyways, after a while and being charged an arm and a leg for them... I let them expire. Why would porn companies use .xxx? I bet Playboy will continue to hold, update and consider as a corporate/business portal, playboy.com to be their primary domain; even if they do in fact put all "content" on a playboy.xxx domain. This would go for all "adult" related sites, including perhaps companies such as F Street, DejaVu and others. Will Victoria Secrets be forced onto a .xxx domain? I doubt it. One problem is the fact that "xxx" means something totally different than just "porn". "xxx" has the connotation of degrading things, less tasteful depictions of "porn". I'll agree, Playboy and Penthouse is "porn", but Hustler or some weird Japanese fecal fetish magazine is "xxx". It's always been this way, and I fail to foresee it ever changing any time soon.
They will ALL have the .com and the .xxx domains in the end. As for those who find .xxx easy to "filter"... you'll still have all the old filter lists all the same because Playboy.com will still be erotic enough, suggestive enough, obvious enough that it will still be "porn". Only the most extreme smut sites will brag and find it sufficient for only a .xxx domain name such as, analgangbangs.xxx or creampieslurrpies.xxx. Everyone else, they will still have the .com versions of their domains.
Case in point? Are they going to make it a requirement that any content depicting nakedness, by law, must be on a .xxx domain? What if I connect directly to IP address as using scp, ftp or what not? Will it have to reverse to a .xxx host name? This is ridiculous if you ask me... but I think most of all the TLDs are ridiculous. .com, .net, .org, .mil, .smil, .edu... whatever.
I wonder. Basis for this are the fact that neither I nor nobody I know know anybody who ever actually watched pr0n. Even the s-f magazines like playboy are not read by anybody ever since I stopped buying the stuff 15 years ago and even then I was wondering how could a magazine survive if only one person buys and this not even on regular basis??? If that is so then I wonder why is this so important to have or not .xxx domain???
the concept of 'vomit-porn' is not only new to me, but horizon-widening in every sense ...
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Hey now, the fluids that actress just vomited up look awfully like pureed baby food. And... is that... a 70yr old man in a diaper licking it up off the floor?
31 minutes since my last comment? I hope I am not overwhelming the infrastructure here!
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Gerber means "to vomit" in french. Since .xxx is not language specific and vomit has a small but very dedicated and well-paying porn following (really, it does), I have every right to register that name and use it to sell vomit-porn to the francophone market. As long as I am not using the name in a way that would lead to trademark confusion (which would be pretty hard to argue), Gerber should just butt out.
Apparently you don't have kids because I for one can testify that baby food leads to a lot of vomit.
the concept of 'vomit-porn' is not only new to me, but horizon-widening in every sense ...
No, the horizon-widening porn is called scat. Don't google it!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
that the XXX URL suffix is typed with one hand?
They rarely enforce the intended uses of the existing TLDs. Did you really think .xxx would be any different?
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Alt.sex.watersports never involved synchronized swimming, either.
--
BMO
Anyone who is surprised by this has simply not been paying attention.
Oh my G*d ... it's a shakedown.
Yeah, I feel sooooo sorry for those multimillion (billion?) dollar corporations that may have to register 10 or 20 domains to protect their brand image, I'm sure it's a huge financial burden.
And they may possibly have to raise the prices of their products and services, because of the "shakedown" you know.
Really, does anybody with an IQ higher than 70 believe that crap?
they'll let me register .cum domains. And if .asm is ever up for grabs, put me down from org.asm.
It's silly. Even though the US law recognizes cybersquatting / domain-snipping as an illegal activity, domain distribution should be conducted on first-come-first-serve bases.
Mod parent up. The domain system was meant to be strictly hierarchical, with most entities registering domains at the third or even the fourth level.
The perversion of system into a quasi-flat namespace centered around second-level domains came about because the planned high-level directory service for the Internet never materialized. These days most people use search engines to do much the same thing, albeit at the cost of standardization and protocol / vendor independence.
Except other, more reputable, agencies handling domains always give trademark holders and current domain holders first dubs on names before allowing others in. It seems they are already to the "bidding" stage with no mechanism to allow current rights holders to protect their rights... The registrar should be sued outright for not putting methods in place every other registrar agreed to after years of lawsuits.
Having com/org/net/xxx just confuses people. The TLD should be by country, with that country having complete control over it. If Iran wants to censor stuff they can but only for their own domain- and at the national firewalls going into the country. Same for the USA, same for Britain... Get rid of all these silly TLD's and just have national ones.
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I figure that Disney's Hollywood Records subsidiary is a problem, any issues with the message of classic Disney cartoons nonwithstanding.
Hollywood Records is responsible for especially crappy pop music (Miley Cyrus, Hillary Duff, the Jonas Brothers) that pushes an eerily clean-cut image
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
You haven't heard of '2 girls 1 cup' ?
(unlike weirdo country-code TLDs) .xxx is likely to be more recognizable than the obscure ones
For the general population I'm not sure .xxx is any more recognizable than .tv. If I were Gerber I would not worry about domain squatters on either, or else if they were going to get Gerber.xxx at least have large-chested scantily clad models advertising their food to get babies drooling when they view the site.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
where is .cum??!!
You haven't heard of '2 girls 1 cup' ?
I know I wish I hadn't.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Uh, dude you can buy Disney Porn at their themeparks. Why would they object to having a .xxx domain, other than the usual TM violation issues?
Where do I sign up?
Ain't that the truth.
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Thanks for that. I just finished eating a slightly undercooked cheese, tomato, and onion omelette.
Yeesh!
Aside from the meaningful TLDs like .mil, .edu and .gov.... get rid of them. If we're going to have a .xxx TLD, make rules that ALL pr0n be hosted at such. If you own pr0n.com it can be a SfW site that links to pr0n.xxx. The only reason to have .xxx is if it is going to be meaningful/useful.
We don't need CocaCola.com the soda site and CocaCola.us the pr0n site.
Hit "Reply to This" to post some bullshit defense for TLDs that i won't read.
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I think the people of Amsterdam is going to be sad.. First they get their own domain .xxx, and then there is going to be all these restrictions on it.. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam#Symbols
I thought it was called speculum porn. Or goatse...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Wouldn't it be interesting if trademarks were expanded to include ALL of the TLD for that name? Sure the registration and renewal would be higher but it would be a lot easier if FooBar(tm) would own FooBar.??? when they get their trademark? Then no matter what new TLDs were added they would automatically own them and the problem would go away.
Limiting the cost to the combo of registering each one individually would be completely fair to small businesses. When a new TLD is added then the cost gets put onto the next renewal.
Problem solved. Oh wait - then there wouldn't be the opportunity to try to extort large sums of money by domain squatters, domain registrars or anyone else who wants to get their fingers into the companies wallets.
Just because you have a trademark somewhere doesn't mean you should be able to monopolize a name. Trademark is for a specific good or service in a market to prevent confusion between the goods or services of different companies in the same market.
Trademark is not meant to exclude the name's use in a market not entered by the company. Nobody but the Ford Motor Company can sell cars under the name "Ford," or under that name sell any of the dozens of other goods and services for which Ford has a trademark. But other companies sell things like gum and dietary supplements under the name "Ford."
Gerber is not in the porn market; therefore, Gerber has no exclusive rights to the name in that market. If I want to produce porn, I should be able to register Gerber.xxx. Or if my name is Gerber and I want to register "Gerber's porn reviews" as gerber.xxx I have an even better case.
It seems that with rather trivial work on DNS lookup software you could set them to check the 2nd level domain name component in set order:
E.g. When looking up gerber.xxx DNS first of all looks up gerber.com, gerber.org, gerber.net gerber.edu gerber.mil and gerber.gov
If there is such a listing, it redirects to that instead. Thus you could register gerber.xxx but you would have to go out of your way to actually see it.
Indeed, I can see a case being made to require 2nd level domains to be globally unique. E.g. if you register foo.com, you cannot register foo.org or foo.net.
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.felon doesn't fit the .### convention as well as .666. I wonder if the Aleister Crowley crowd would complain?
His business, Nissan, fixed Datsuns.
Of course - that is the whole business model for .xxx (and some other future gTLD's). There is no reason why established business (adult entertainment or otherwise) to want a .xxx delegation. If they already have com/net/cc's registers, they have an invested marketing in that. If they are new, why get an .xxx delegation that you know will be blocked by ISP's or entire countries?
No, the horizon-widening porn is called scat. Don't google it!
Why not, I love that shit.
Ba-dum, tish...
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