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Australia Bans Cybersquatting
Uncle Dazza writes "An Australian court has ruled cybersquatting illegal" But the scary part about the article is
the comment about "Deceptively Similiar". I'm wondering what that
would mean for a parody website with a deceptive URL. In the US, Parody has been held up in the courts, so this law may be interesting.
First, I know the U.S. Constitution has nothing to do with Australia, so I'm already off-topic.
I have a proposal I'd like to put forth, though:
In order to discourage U.S. legislators from proposing or supporting unconstitutional laws, I suggest a "three strikes and you're out" program.
It's a very simple system -- whenever legislation passes Congress and is signed into law, it is subject to judicial review. If the Supreme Court finds that a piece of legislation violates the Constitution, the legislators who sponsored the legislation get a "strike".
If a legislator sponsors three bills which fail the court test, that legislator is out of office. His constitutients must elect a replacement to serve the rest of the term.
The justification for this? Legislators take an oath of office to preserve and defend the Constitution. If they have tried three times to violate the Constitution, they have violated their oath of office. This just puts some meaning into the oath, IMO.
If you REALLY want to shake things up, make this apply to legislators who VOTED for unconstitutional legislation.
Any third-party candidates want to put this forward? I would be happy to lend my support.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
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I am of two minds. I think that parody is OK. However I strongly object to people (for instance) going out, buying celebrity names, and then blackmailing the celebrity by threatening to do things like put up a porn site.
As the saying goes, "Your freedom to extend your fist ends at my face." Cybersquatting does not deserve to be rewarded, but I think that reasonable people can draw the distinction between squatting and deliberate parody.
Cheers,
Ben Tilly
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
This is exactly what happened to Warner Brothers and the name Roadrunner.
Pork is not a verb
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Didn't anybody tell the aussie's that only certain north american countries with 3 letter initials could order the rest of the online world around? :)
Seriously now, what we need is a international movement to eliminate regulation of the internet. Otherwise one of two scenarios are going to result:
1) the internet becomes hopelessly fractured into hundreds of mini-nets ala the Great Firewall of China.
2) It becomes impossible to do anything online because some other country might have made it illegal. And quite frankly, e-commerce has it bad enough right now with national legislation, let alone the international problems that would arise by regulation of the internet. Witness the crypto jihad the US is on.
Either way, we lose, and the internet in it's present form ceases to exist. I simply don't believe that there is a technical solution yet to stop legislators from passing stupid laws short of using shock collars everytime they vote stupidly.
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Hum, yes, Parody of trademarks has been upheld in the United States as "acceptable use". But a domain name in of itself is not parody.
Can someone grab the domain name "micro-soft.com" and use it to sell computer software? Hum, sounds pretty questionable to me, because selling software isn't much of a parody (hey, that rhymes!)
Can I grab the name "micro-soft.com" and make a paradoy site? Maybe I could get away with that. But then if I try to sell the domain name to Billy G. for $1000000, is it still that much of a paraody? Wouldn't the parody still work if it was "micropoop.com"?
Although I agree that one has to be very careful about giving corporatations the right to misuse the rights of others, trademark laws exist and should be applied fairly to both individuals and corporations large and small.
On another point, domain names were never suposed to be a commodity, and it's sad that some people have made and lost millions just by registering a stupid name.
The U.S. cybersquatting law recently passed by the Senate requires that the courts prove you registered a domain "in bad faith."
Bad faith is a tough thing to prove in court.
If you knowingly register a domain because it's the name of a company or a trademark, and route traffic to a competing company or to something like a porn site, you've gone a long way towards proving bad faith.
If you register a domain for the purpose of parody and publish a parody site (as in my own Drudge Retort at http://www.drudge.com), you're on strong legal ground in the U.S. The Senate's cybersquatting law even affirms the use of a domain for the purpose of parody or political comment (such as www.pepsibloodbath.com).
Another way to get yourself in trouble is to register a domain that's identical (or similar) to a company's name or trademark, and contact that company to see if they're interested in buying it. That would look terrible in court -- some domain registrants in the UK lost all of their domains by contacting companies like Virgin to sell domain names they had acquired.
Anyone who is concerned about this legislation in the U.S. should visit the Congress Web site at http://thomas.loc.gov and search for bill number S.1255.RS, the "Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999." The bill is fairly limited in the kind of domain use that is being prohibited.
Rogers Cadenhead (Web: http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench)
I've said it before, I'll say it again: the current domain name system has become practically worthless. We need a replacement system which is more like a yellow pages, or better yet, like Yahoo, where you browse through multiple levels to get to what you wanted. With a properly designed structure, there would be more than one way to get to a company (e.g. a software company could be found under categories of programming, under software sales, etc.). Of course the category names would need to be kept short (an abbreviated version, plus a spelled out version in each language to make it easier to follow). The only real tricky part would be differentiating between companies who do about the same thing and have the same name (I'm in such a company; the owner of the name is in an unrelated industry). Maybe something that differentiates them by location in such cases?
Needless to say, a critical part would be to make it prohibited to grab a name for resale, to take a trademarked name, to have a deceptive name, or to intentionally place something in an inappropriate category (make them sign a contract that has a _huge_ fine if they break the rules).
It might look like, for a bad example: "com.soft.os.intel-compatible.microsoft" (root at the top to differentiate from the current system)
Hopefully _somebody_ in a position to pull it off (standards org?) is preparing for something like this.
Personally I thought it was hilarious that, for the past few months, www.starwars.co.uk was registered to someone random and just had the Apache "successfully installed" screen on it. But I suppose that counts less as piracy than as ripping the piss out of Beardy Lucas and his Legendary Bank Balance.
Anyway, though: isn't all of this already covered by e.g. trade descriptions acts, that, if you're passing yourself off as another business (and it can be shown to the satisfaction of a court that you are) then you're breaking the law? In which case that sort of cybersquatting was already illegal.
The original point was, I think, that someone was pretending to be Melbourne IT, or whatever, to get customers. Just because a website doesn't have exactly what it says in the name is no reason to be put in jail; you need to be further misleading customers to the detriment of other businesses and your profit.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, and I'm only speaking from an English perspective here.)