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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?"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.