Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Porn-Industry Outsiders Fear 'Shakedown' In .XXX TLD

Posted by timothy on from the sure-would-be-a-shame-if-anything-was-t'-happen dept.

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?"

19 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Gerber.xxx? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Funny

    Does Gerber have any idea what big appetites adult-baby fetishists must have? Ka-ching!

  2. His is this any different from other TLDs? by msobkow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:His is this any different from other TLDs? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It isn't fundamentally different(which is, in large part, why those horrible 'arbitrary-string TLD' people must die); but I suspect that .xxx is slightly worse than some, in that(unlike .net) it is largely useless to 'mainstream' trademark holders except on defence, and (unlike .edu) there aren't substantial restrictions on who can register for .xxxes, and, (unlike weirdo country-code TLDs) .xxx is likely to be more recognizable than the obscure ones; but not useful for subsidiaries/marketing in the major-market ones. Just a pure shakedown.

    2. Re:His is this any different from other TLDs? by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's similar in a way, and they already have been trying to push that (all the registrars nag, sometimes insistently, about registering variants). At first glance this raises the stakes by putting forth the possibility of someone not only squatting on a variant of your name, but an "unsavory" version of it. disney.info is squatting, but disney.xxx maybe would damage the brand. Like if there were a .felon domain name and someone registered your full name dot felon or something.

      On the other hand, it's long been possible to convert a non-offensive domain name into an offensive domain-squat by just putting up unsavory content on the domain, like in the ol' whitehouse.gov/whitehouse.com thing.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    3. Re:His is this any different from other TLDs? by martin-boundary · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Hold on a second. Just who is domain squatting whom in disney.xxx? I get that a corporation like Disney feels that wherever their name appears it somehow means that they own it, but to be fair, .xxx is intended to convey information to *us, the web surfing public* that we can and should expect pornographic material.

      As such, if disney.xxx is reserved for Disney, *they* are the ones squatting on a potentially legitimate pornographic website. That's wrong, and shouldn't be encouraged. After all, xxx isn't intended for them in the first place, and they certainly have no intention of using the domain appropriately for the TLD's purpose.

    4. Re:His is this any different from other TLDs? by Ihmhi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Easy answer. A domain squatter is someone who owns a domain and doesn't have nearly as much money as the person who wants it.

      --
      Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
    5. Re:His is this any different from other TLDs? by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Exactly. Remember mikerowesoft.com? The guy's name was Mike Rowe, and he had a software company. He had every right to that domain name and company name, but Microsoft forced him to give it up.

  3. Re:This has already been discussed by characterZer0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A couple hundred bucks so something bad does not happen to you (wink wink) is a shakedown, regardless of how much money the shakee has.

    --
    Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
  4. Worst of both worlds? by jensend · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Worst of both worlds? by Anthony+Mouse · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      The trouble is that it can't work that way. You can't exclude all smut to a single set of domains for a large number of reasons. For one thing, nobody really agrees on a definition. For another, any single domain may contain a wide variety of things: You can find a metric ton of non-smut on tumblr, but you can also find plenty of naked women there too. And you basically end up with two choices: Either you banish all of those websites in their entirety to .xxx and then all of their non-smut content ends up behind the filter (and you hit First Amendment problems in the US), or you let websites containing smut use non-.xxx domains, but then the filter doesn't actually block the smut because nobody uses exclusively .xxx when they can reach a larger audience by paying another $8/year to get the equivalent .com domain.

      The problem is really with filtering in general, not with domains: You have a trade-off between false negatives and false positives. The only way to have a low number of false negatives is to have a high number of false positives and vice versa. And we decided a long time ago that it's better for government to accept the large number of false negatives and then let people choose for themselves what content they want to consume, than to have a government censorship board that decides what people can see and hear.

    2. Re:Worst of both worlds? by tomhudson · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You can protect the tradmark by sending them a C & D. No need to fall for this extortion scam.

  5. Re:This has already been discussed by gstrickler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If a trademark owner has to pay again each year to prevent their registered trademark from being used in each TLD, that sounds like a "protection racket" to me. And when they keep adding new TLDs, the cost and effort keeps rising each year. I don't know what the solution is, but the current system definitely resembles "paying for protection".

    --
    make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
  6. Re:Disney.xxx ? isnt there already such a site ? by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Disney does wield an enormous amount of power over our culture. Think about the millions of children who grow up watching Disney films, which represent a particular set of values and ideals that are being drilled into the heads of those children. Whether or not this is comparable for pornography is another issue entirely, but it is not as if there is nothing to the argument that Disney is indoctrinating children into a particular culture (nor is it a stretch to think that Disney is subtly using this power to its advantage).

    --
    Palm trees and 8
  7. In other news by Mensa+Babe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    --
    Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
  8. Hey, Gerber does not get to monopolize the name! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:Never forget who OWNS the Washington Times. by NiceGeek · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't know when people started taking the stance that all opinions and all sources should be given equal time and weight, but it has led to a massively uninformed populace.

  10. Re:Hey, Gerber does not get to monopolize the name by bmo · · Score: 3, Funny

    Alt.sex.watersports never involved synchronized swimming, either.

    --
    BMO

  11. Re:Welcome to capitalism by Grishnakh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, it's more like, "Welcome to Florida". The level of corruption in this state is unbelievable. Lawyers mismanaging senior citizen trust funds is rampant in Florida, and there's absolutely nothing that family members can do about it. Any time a lawyer gets a hold of a senior citizens' funds because that person is incapacitated, the lawyer immediately makes up all kinds of bogus legal fees and charges them to the person's account, draining their funds in a matter of months. It's impossible to file a Bar complaint, because that will cause the lawyers to sue the complainant, and the Bar tells that to anyone who calls them to file a complaint about an attorney.

    This kind of corruption is nothing new in the USA, but it's raised to an absurd level in Florida. Apparently, a lot of people are so mad about it that they're going to stage an event where they fly planes with banners protesting the state of affairs over the county court houses all across the state, at the same time.

  12. Re:Welcome to capitalism by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Won't work. You can't effectively defend against a lawsuit by an attorney, because you won't find another attorney to take your case, or if you do, he won't do his job, he'll just give you bills but not actually do the work because he's really on the other guy's side. Lawyers ALWAYS cover for each other. And don't forget, the Judge in the case will be the golfing buddy of the lawyer you're suing, so he'll never rule for you anyway.

    One rule about lawyers: lawyers never sue each other.