Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
--
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.