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Henley.com, Reznor.com. Is Your Name Next?
Here at Slashdot we tend to get certain things submitted a lot. Big companies going after "The Little Guy", especially regarding domain names seems to be one of them. Sometimes I feel bad for people because they owned trademarked names, but it looks like they are just squatting, but what about your name? Henley.com is being chased by
Don Henley (thanks Netizen) and
Reznor.com is owned by AJ Reznor
being chased by Thomas & Betts. In each case, a person registered the name given to them at birth, but now a corporation wants to take it because they have a trademark. How do you protect your name?
This is not 100% cast in stone; a friend registered a national-level domain by getting someone in another province to go in on the application. However, sorting individuals by location makes collisions like the ones in the article less likely to happen. The ".ind" TLD for individuals is a neat idea, but we'd still have a race condition between those of us with common names :-)
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neophase
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neophase
The following Was taken from the official unofficial ninfaq version 7.3
"As a matter of fact, there *is* a connection! The Reznor company was founded in 1888 in (you guessed it!) Mercer, PA by one George Reznor, an ancestor of Trent's. (We don't know the specifics of the relationship, but we think it's his great- or great-great grandfather...) In addition to starting the company, George also invented the original Reznor gas heater, which was one of the first heaters designed for domestic use. To quote the company brochure:
"Reznor was founded in 1888 to manufacture the 'Reznor' reflective heater, which utilized a luminous flame gas burner developed by George Reznor. This technological breakthrough was an immediate success and hastened the expansion of gas heating in residential and commercial applications. Technological development and innovation have been the hallmark of Reznor through the years."
(In other words, if not for Trent's family, we'd all be sitting around freezing our butts off and listening to (your choice of lousy band or musician here)...so think of them whenever you're snuggled up in your nice toasty home listening to music while it's freezing cold outside!)
The Reznor family apparently sold the business to an outside company around World War II (it's currently owned by ITT/Thomas & Betts), but it's still in business today, cranking out various types of heaters and central heating & cooling units, in addition to being the single largest employer in Mercer. (According to the regional representative's secretary, the biggest Reznor customers in Georgia are schools and prisons; the company doesn't really do small-scale domestic heating any more, but a few homes do still have Reznor systems.) The most common places to run into Reznors are restaurants, small stores and boutiques, garages, barns, nightclubs and bars, especially if they're located in an older building or a warehouse-type setting. Most of the heaters you'll see are small-to-medium sized ceiling- mounted, gas-powered units w/a fan in the back, and tend to come in 2 basic styles: (1) silver-toned metal with "REZNOR" in raised letters on the front; and (2) painted metal with a small plaque (or "ratings plate") that says "REZNOR/Mercer, Pennsylvania" bolted onto either the lower front corner or on the side.
Apparently a Reznor heater plays a prominent role in the Sean Connery/ Nicolas Cage movie The Rock, falling on and squishing one of the actors.
Probably a bit too much info but hey we only use 10% of our brain anway the other 90%, can hold some of this Mindless BS
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What if the Don Henley who owns the domain is older than Don Henley the musician?
Well, I have a free subdomain anyway... *.obsidian.darker.net - except it makes people think I'm a goth (nothing wrong with that, I'm just not), as well as my own *.distortedreality.net
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
i am in agreement with most.
No country owns the internet, so who controls how it operates. no court should.
First come, first serve. only makes sense. If you have no legitamate claim, ie, you want win2000.com to make fun of M$, then there is a debate. But if it is you name, your company name(however large or small it is), you town, your nickname, your dogs name, whatever; first come - first serve.
Even if you want to look at that as a contract...
You violated it by not having the banner ad up.
It's his domain, he paid for it.
There's nothing you can, or even should be able to do.
Sounds to me like you're whineing because you didn't get your way with these domains.
I donno why I'm even replying to this. It will just drag out this "Someone else got there and did what I wanted to do first, and I dont like it" thread.
-- This post contains %100 recycled electrons Remove spam and eggs to send some mail.
This brings up an interesting point. The fact that you are _allowed_ to register any *.com domain. Does this mean that American law should not view whatever.com as being even possible to infringe on a copyright?
The legaleze seems pretty crap and half-hearted anyway, perhaps why the lawyer didn't reply to Mr Henley's correspondance. It's only about 1 in 5 times that you guess a domain for something famous and it turns out to be right, we'd use search engines, and as Don Henley points out, his is registered as such and has probably had a lot of visitors that had searched for him specifically.
A phone book lists lots of Don or D Henley's, perhaps they should sue the phone companies for publishing misleading data that aren't really "Don Henley's".
I think you'll find every single 'normal' dictionary word (and its plural) as well as every 3 letter combinations has been registered on the .com, .net and .org domains. If you find any that haven't been registered then let me know!
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Unless you infringe a trademark. Cheaper for Mega Co to pay a few 1000 bucks than take you to court though....
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I registered my family name as a domain name in Germany: www.koehntopp.de. To protect me from lawsuits, and to offer other people of the same name an opportunity to have their family name as a domain name, I offer free links to homepages and mail aliases for that domain, if they live in Germany and go by the proper family name.
Some other people I know are doing just the same, even linking companies of that name. Avoids confusion and creates fair access to the name.
On the first point, if they do really have operations that legitimately fall under all three TLD classifications, then they should be able to legitimately get domains in all three. As for shell entities, you'll never be able to stop them but you can make them go to the hassle of setting up believable entities. To be honest, I'd add one more rule to DNS, basically 'use it or lose it'. If a domain isn't active, has no active addresses registered under it and has no traffic except to bounce people to another domain, anyone who wants it can use that as grounds to challenge the registration and get it revoked. It won't stop a determined company, but it will raise the bar some.
As for mis-use, little can be done about that before the fact. I'd say, though, that yes if you mis-use a TLD you should have your registration yanked. If you're a for-profit business operating under a a .org name, ICANN shouldn't be going hunting for you but if anyone complains they should give you a warning to switch to the proper domain or lose your registration.
That depends on how you organize ICANN. Personally, I'd set it up with enough people in control with enough conflicting interests that it's not feasible to bribe everyone you'd need to bribe. And the foreign law firm would still be seen as the interloper suing the local operation. The idea is to set it up so that anyone making a challenge within the ICANN system would, if the challenge is reasonable, have support within ICANN, but nobody can get enough support to write their own ticket unless they really do deserve it and nobody can try applying pressure from outside through legal maneuvering without hitting exactly the same barriers the big corporations have been using to their advantage to date. And I wouldn't pick a banana republic, but as I said some small South Pacific island where you can literally know everyone in the entire national government. Big law firms don't work against that.
ICANN isn't entirely set up this way at present, but that can be changed under ICANN rules. And as a US citizen I really have to question whether US law should have any say in how the rather international DNS system is run. I really think that ICANN and such should be outside any one country's laws and staffed by people who are more concerned with the technical than the political/legal aspects. But maybe I'm being overly-idealistic.
The problem with this is that most people are for-profit, with a few exceptions such as clergy.
The point was that no John Smiths will be trademarked in your subdomain. If there's a big company with it TM'd, then they'd use a COMmercial domain name. I think reznor.com is a perfectly OK site...but the Don Henley one? It's a personal site, and should NOT have a .com address!
doh! the url for Strawberries - www.strawberriesonline.com
BLOCK STRUCTURE breathing apparatus required for special maneuvers!!
You've obviously never tried to get a .us domain name. I've registered more than 250 of them in the past 6 years. Each time, it is a pain. A different organization controls each state_name.us domain, and then many more different organizations control the city_name.state_name.us. Then, even more control the organization.city_name.state_name.us names. Of course, first you have to figure-out the organization name scheme. For example co. is "county of" and ci. is "city of". Each state_name.us seems to have made-up their own complicated scheme. For example, I tried to get firesaftey.ci.paloalto.ca.us domain name for the local fire department. I had to trackdown the organization that controls the .ca.us domains to get their permission. Then, paloalto.ca.us, then ci.paloalto.ca.us. After all of that, the city turned down the request for the fire department. Also, I've had existing domains like ci.some_city.ca.us taken from the owning city, because the ca.us dictator didn't like it's content. There are not uniformly enforced rules, so it's next to impossible to obtain and keep a .us domain name. You think NSI is bad? Just wait until you have to deal with some two-bit dictator that considers the whatever.us domain name he owns to be his personal property. In several cases, I've had the appointed whatever.ca.us dictator take customers from me. It's bad when you can't get a domain name, but the dictator (in most cases, an ISP) calls-up your customer (they have that information, because you have to give it to them) and gives them a sales pitch. Atleast NSI doesn't do that.
Some folks may remember the story here several months ago about theos.com.
Seems there is a software company called theos, that wanted the domain. Currently, i belongs to Theo De Raadt, leader of the OpenBSD project.
The short version of the story is that Theo got to keep it, I believe primarily because the software company realized that Theo was more popular than they, and they would be doing themselves PR damage.
Actually the Clan McDonald is having serious problems with some sort of fast food restarurant over this issue. Seems that the fast food place doesn't like having other businesses trade under the name McDolands or even use the prefix "Mc".
Hey! ISO! IANA! ICANN! Implement this now! It's even backwards compatible with DNS!
You are correct that AnonymousCoward.com is taken, as is iAnonymous.com. However, iCoward.com, eCoward.com, and vCoward.com are all available. (Or were a few minutes ago.)
If search engines updated within a reasonable amount of time, it wouldnt be bad... as it, it's hell.
-- Soon we'll be sliding down the razorblade of life...
Indeed.
Hence schumann.cleveland.oh.us.
I don't know what the big fuss is about. The regional domains are for regional use. And .us is a region.
In Finland a person is not allowed to register a .fi -domain. Only companies, registered organizations and such are allowed to register domain-names (corresponding to their company name of course). I am not saying this is the way it should be handled, but at least the aforementioned problem could not occur. If I ever want a domain of my own I will have to settle for a .com, .net or .org domain, or maybe I could buy a little island somewhere and have my own TLD :)
--
Mikael Riska
your last name was microsoft. Your whole family would probably be sued out of existance. Seriously though, I would think that in that situation you would only lose if you were somehow dilluting the trademark ie: if Mr. Reznor was selling industrial heaters or something else in that market...
The .com domains will always be fought over, we can't really help that. Money will talk. But there was a proposal a few years back for the top-level domain .ind for "individual" (I think), and I think this is a great idea. We should make it so that no courts could ever have power over certain high-level domains.
First post ?
Q-Bert
Because geographic orientation is foolish. Society is no longer tied to birthplace these days, except perhaps in backwoods areas. Of course, your solution also fails to address the case of the "John Smiths" out there. Many of us were cursed with common names.
I remeber something a while back with Avery (yah know the labels) not being able to get a domain name for the company.
I know in Australia, .com.au only goes to businesses, and they have some wierd one for family names
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You neglect to mention one important fact. The wine is *good* wine! Here is a perfect example of product quality winning out over marketing clout. (Walter "Bully Hill" T. : PepsiCo :: Linux : Win*)
I've already tried every combination of my name and they've been taken. It seems to be a popular trend among the Real Estate agent market too....
.per? .ind? Hello! Can you say "John Smith"? (Am I the only one who sees this obvious aspect?)
So what's the reznor.com connection? Is there a Reznor I don't know about?
The only thing I can think of is Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame (www.nin.com), but I kind of doubt he'd give a damn about some random site bearing his last name (there is a industrial strength heater company bearing the 'Reznor' name, founded by one of his distant relatives, that might have a problem though - a Reznor heater played a large part in 'The Rock', I believe).
So who is complaining about that domain? 'Thomas and Betts'? Who is that?
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
So you are proposing the use of an immoral Universal IDentifier that so many of us have been fighting for years? Sheesh!
As long as you are either not using your name by way of trade, or in a different (trade) area than than the big company, I think you should be allowed to use your own name. There would obviously be problems for a Mr Ford if he put up a web site on cars, or Ms MacDonald if she went into the food business. Otherwise, if they wanted the domain name they should have registered it before the private individual.
The question is, though, how legitimate are the .com claims to .org and .net entities? In my scenerio they're more jusitifications for having the names than real-world entities that accomplish much.
This is why I suggest just eliminating TLDs alltogether. You can't *possibly* plug the loopholes to stop xyz.com from trying to claim xyz in every possible TLD, and any attempt to will just bureaucratize the registration process so badly as to make it unmanageable.
You *might* make it work if you required a federal tax ID for every registration and then created the penalty of loss of all registrations for organizations that attempted to acquire more than one identical domain name in other TLDs. Got xyz.com? If you or any other entity you control attempts to get xyz.net or xyz.org then you lose xyz.com. You could even double-check by checking zonefiles for the other xyz.* domains for references to xyz.com or IPs found in xyz.com.
Or, make it so that 1 xyz registation cost $100 and was good for two years, two cost $100,000 and was good for a year, all three cost $1,000,000 and was good for six months. Although I doubt you could make it expensive enough to thwart major corporations, since many of them have advertising and marketing budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars and they may look at the internet as an important enough marketing tool to justify the expense.
The extra money should go towards the IETF or some entity that might actually do some good.
Common words and last / first names /phrases shouldn't be trademarkable in the first place.
We need to get over our
-r
They should not be allowed to use any information you give them about your customer. That's just disgusting behavior. It's no wonder people don't want to mess with such a screwed up system. Maybe if it actually worked it would be an alternative.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
My last name is Ford, and I thought about registering a domain way, way, back, but I decided it could be more trouble then it'd be worth.
You can check this out at www.sumpton.com, where he's got a listing of all the domain names he owns. You too can have an address @bulldozer.com :)
-mike kania
wouldn't it make sense to require a tax ID to register a .com (commercial) domain?!?
/.?!?
Likewise, create two new TLD's:
    .inc (incorporated) - requires art. of inc.
    .ind (individual) - no last names
Also, fees should be commensurate to TLD:
    .inc - $1K/yr
    .com - $500/yr
    .ind - $100/yr
any thoughts?!?
thor
ps. anyone else having probs connecting to
Think international. Think impossible to regulate.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Enough said.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
When I registered a domain name to use (should I ever be a high-priced consultant) I used PeterArmstrong.com. I obviously couldn't use Armstrong.com (since that's tile flooring, but it could have been cheese), but that didn't bother me since using one's first and last name seems a lot more personal. People whose first and last names have been registered could just add in their middle name or initial or whatever... Until .com loses its sex appeal lots of people will want a .com so that seems to be the best interim solution...
Suppose I have microsoft.com and I live in Africa. how will the court order me to transfer the name to microsoft corp.? Just curious.
This would not be a problem if the two mentioned sites had used .org or .net, both more appropriate for non-commercial sites. Argel (forgot my password)
from his third letter to the lawyers:
"I do, however, insist upon my right to use my own name, even if he uses it too. I had already been Don Henley for seven years when your client was born."
I remember seeing on 60 minutes a while back that McDonalds Corporation was suing a small English hamburger shop called MacDonalds, claiming market confusion -- even though the people were really named MacDonald. McDonalds sued for them to change their name, claiming they had the right to do so because they've used the name as a restaurant for a much longer period of time. Then, some Scot stepped forward to defend the defendants claiming he was the oldest true decendent of the McDonald clan -- and the guy runs a restaurant called McDonald's that's been around for a hundred or so years -- he counter sued McDonalds for misuse of his name. McDonalds Corporation backed off.
Here's what seems to me a squatter on my last name. So, I had to settle for an .org address. Domain squatters need to rot in hell.
You can register a US Domain at http://www.nic.us/ -- they also have all the information that you could possibly want about the .us domain
If you are not american, you can go to IANA (http://www.iana.org/) to find out the URL of your countries top level domain registrar.
-abf.
-abf.
same as in sweden. if you are not company you can register domains under .pp.se (pp = private person)
I say fuck copyrighting domain names. However took the initiative and registered the name first should in fact be able to rightfully keep it. I'd hate to see this boil down to people copyrighting their own names.
I don't even think your are 100% about the very well know names such as McDonalds.
/.) that Microsoft was trying to sue a UK supermarket chain (Asda I think) for selling ladies undergarments using the brand name Microsoft; the court ruling was that there was no way computer software and ladies underwear could be confused.
In the UK we have a chain of greetings card shops called McDonalds it is even written in Yellow and Red (same colours as the burger joint).
I've heard stories that McDonalds (the burger people) have tried to sue numerous people in the UK for use of their name and lost every single time, why ? It is the one the most common Scottish names for goodness sake and people are allowed to use their family name as the trading name for their buisness.
Also remember the case recently (I think it was posted to
I just don't understand the logic (or rather the lack thereof) on the part of these companies. If reznor.com is taken, look at reznorheaters.com or something along those lines. It's effective to customers, and saves on legal fees. If you really HAVE to have reznor.com, work with the owner. See if you can buy it. See if you can strike a deal where you'll pay to host their pages for a year, and include a pointer and keep their mail bouncing to the new address for a year or three.
A company that I used to work for took this approach on a domain we wanted and it worked wonderfully. Cost us $10,000 plus another two grand in hosting fees. $12,000 is about what, 24 hours of time for legal counsel? Much, much cheaper AND we didn't upset the current owner and risk the associated bad press.
Makes you wonder if Internic isn't really afraid of the bigger companies when judging these things....
-sporty
rolling cows gather no moss
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
This site has a form on their page where you can search for your family name. I just searched for a name that I kind of made up then searched NSI... no .com, .org, or .net. This might just be a ploy for people to get their name in a database he later registers.
I say we all go put in some fake last names that make no sense to see if they later get registered!
Let's spend someone elses money!
It's fun!
It would seem to me that domain names are equivalent to street names: if I open up a hamburger shop on "McDonald's Ave." nobody would ever claim that I am infringing upon somebody's trademark and that I should move my company. However, this is exactly what people are suggesting for domain names. Saying domain names are somehow "rightfully" owned by somebody other than the entity who purchased them is as absurd as saying that McDonalds owns all the property surrounding its resturants, even if it never bothered to purchase it.
Domain names are a limited resource, and hence obey supply and demand.
There are a couple of ways this system could work, the simplest being what we currently have: first come first served. This FCFS system is effectively treating domain names like land property -- whoever owns the land controls how it is used, regardless of whether or not somebody else could use it "better" (a subjective and essentially meaningless term). With this mindset, it is totally absurd to even suggest that somebody else could "claim" a domain that they don't own (minus the government, of course) -- it would be like McDonald's claiming to own the property next to it's resturants, or claiming to own all the land that is on all roads named "McDonald", "McDonald's", "MacDonalds", etc. I understand that it's important for companies to protect their trademarks, but the location of their business (their domanin name is merely a convenient, easy to remember name for their business location -- like saying "the corner of 5th and 7th") is completely unrelated to this.
Now, some may say "But some companies name themselves based upon their location: Amazon.com, EBay.com, etc." This works just fine as long as you own the location -- it would be like me naming my resturant "5th and 7th". However, if I name my business as such *before* purchasing the land, and it turns out that somebody else owns that land, I have no claim upon it.
By saying that companies somehow own all the land associated with their name, it is yet another way that The System is biased toward the large corporations over the small companies. First we must recognize that none of what we talk about is handed to us from God or written in stone -- there are no intrinsic Rights involved. As such, whatever we say you "can" and "cannot" do is purely fictional, and purely up to us to decide. We can decide to create a system that doesn't make any sense and ends up benefiting only those people that can pay enough in legal fees to keep the issue so clouded up that it will never be resolved, or we can choose to make a system that is simple and self regulating. By saying that trademark owners somehow have implicit Rights concerning domain names, we have a system that is chaotic and totally subjective -- there is no objective way to measure who is "right". If, on the other hand, we create system where domain names are owned by a single entity, there is no fuzziness to the issue, and we can objectively ask "Who owns this Domain Name", an it can be resolved without conflict or bias by looking at the deed.
This doesn't fix squatting. It simply shifts the period. There would still be legal battles over popular TLDs, like *.sucks
Now, how hard would it be to implement and manage infinite TLDs? Not that hard.
This would be harder than you think. The root name servers are not designed to be very dynamic. Also, lots of apps (and firmware) have fixed ideas of what the TLDs are. I guess this would give all the Y2K programmers something to work on next year :)
That would be a good idea, except that would create too many possibilities. A domain name is used because it's easy to remember. Otherwise why have one? With all those possible variations, a company would get stuck with a name that no one new. .com is engrained in America's mind, and that's the first thing they think off when they type in an address. I know when I first heard about Slashdot, I tried slashdot.com first, then slashdot.net, and finally slashdot.org. And under your proposed idea, it might be slashdot.linuxnerds or something. And I'd have never guessed that. I guess a company could market it good enough (come to amazon.books!) but it won't be the first thing that someone has in mind when they type in an address.
New TLDs won't help much. Everyone wants a .com.
.web, .mag, etc.. That will mostly serve the registrars. Folks like myself who register domains for my company will have to register the new ones as a protection mechanism, even if we don't want to. If we don't, we have to go through the trademark dispute process, which isn't any fun. It's much cheaper to pay for the new domains.
.to domain. That, or folks like me who have to register company.* again for protection reasons. Not all countries have a trademark dispute, or even have trademarks!
Even if you create
The country TLDs are only of interest to foreigners (of that TLD's country) if they happen to spell out something cute like the
My name is Brian Reuter. Reuter.com, Reuter.net, Reuter.org are all taken. Reuter.com and Reuter.org appear to be owned by the same person (who has a lame "this site underconstruction contact ... ). My only hope is to start a school and get a .edu. Needless to say THE Reuters have no relation to me, unfortunately.
A while ago, I saw a feature story on an evening news show about a restaurant in Scotland called McDonald's. The McDonalds company sued to make the owner change the name, which turned out to be a mistake because the owner was THE McDonald of Clan McDonald, and Scottish law is pretty biased toward his side. McDonalds (the company) backed down pretty quick when they realized he had the power to force THEM to change the name of all their fast food joints (in Scotland), if he so choose.
Just enforce the rules on TLD usage. You're a commercial operation? Any application for a .org name will be denied automatically. Not providing network services to others? Forget getting a .net domain name. Not operating commercially ( eg. an individual or non-profit organization )? No .com for you. Just because the corporations want to pollute the DNs doesn't mean we have to let them. And just to make it harder, put ICANN outside the United States, maybe on one of those South Pacific islands who don't care about politics as long as your checks clear. Let the corporations sue in a country where they're the interlopers and the people they're suing are the locals.
I looked into registering my name as a .us domain several years ago. The irritating thing about .us domains is that they are geographically organized. I may live in chi.il.us right now, but next month I could move to nyc.ny.us. In this event I'm either saddled with a domain that is long, cluttered, and doesn't even reflect reality, or I'm forced to change my domain name, only to quite possibly find someone else in the nyc.ny.us domain already has it.
.uk, .au, .nl, .de) have wisely avoided this, either by subdomaining themselves along the "com", "edu", etc. heiarchy (e.g. co.uk) or by simply allowing more flexible domains beneath the national domain. I took advantage of this to get "jean.nu", though "jean.personal.us" or even "jean.liddle.private.us" would have been fine with me as well. "jean.chi.il.us" (even if it were still available) becomes really irritating when I've moved to nyc.ny.us. Of course, one could continue this rant forever, discussing the lack of relevance geography has with respect to the internet and the World Wide Web in the first place, but perhaps this is enough to communicate the reason why some (many?) of us aren't all that enthralled with the .us domain, even though the price is right ...
Most other nations (e.g.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Seems to me this has already been decided in a few court cases. There are a bunch of people right now registering every domain name they can think of, then reselling them for (requesting bids at upwards of 1 million) big bucks. No one can or has stopped them. The biggest thing I would face, if I could get "www.rollingstones.com" before they (the band or the mag) got it, would be continued harassment by someone, but all in all, i think it is perfectly legal, because you are not using that name to promote or associate yourself with them.. just to have the name. Otherwise you would be forced to pay a royalty every time you wrote, or spoke those names, wouldnt you? As for Trent.. quit being a weenie.. you already HAVE nothing.nin.com or whatever it is..
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
All this is just pointing out the inadequacy of the way DNS is currently being used to categorize different types of names. There needs to be some kind of way to distinguish between the Real Names of legal entities, as well as "trademarks" that entities might "own".
BTW, does it seem wrong to anybody else that a entities which have no corporeal existence (corporations, for example) have more rights than real individuals?
Not to mention that Slashdot isn't a nonprofit organization, and freshmeat isn't a network provider.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You can't seriously be suggesting that MailBank is a squatter.
For those just tuning in, MailBank is a company that buys second level domain names, and rents third level namespace under that (e.g. if they own smith.com, they can rent out john.smith.com and the john@smith.com email address).
By buying yourname.com, you're explicitly preventing every other person with that name from getting some nice-sounding namespace of their own. The folks at MailBank aren't humanitarians, but at least it's democratic--they allow many people to share parts of the namespace that would have otherwise been hogged by a single buyer.
One could conceivably make the case that you're the "squatter," preventing other people with your last name from acquiring some decent namespace (after all, what gives you the right to essentially declare yourself the preeminent holder of your last name?)
I have the domain slumberland.seattle.wa.us, registered after NSI shut off my old domain, slumberland.com, in a domain name dispute with Slumberland Furniture. (I wasn't "domain-squatting" -- the domain was the name of my BBS, and at the time I got the domain name, Slumberland wasn't trademarked in the US -- not only that, they don't do business in my part of the US, so I didn't know they existed.) Anyway, the dispute has been satisfactorily settled, and I now have slumberland.org -- but I still use slumberland.seattle.wa.us most of the time when I am filling out forms on the web.
.gov, .mil, and .us addresses so you get 100% .com and .net addresses!"
:) I think I'll keep using the .us address for a while. Free and nearly spamproof? Sounds good to me.
Why would I use the longer, harder to type, more confusing domain name?
Easy. In 2 years of having slumberland.seattle.wa.us, I've only gotten 2 or 3 spams to that address. (The first one was in June. The address was spam free for more than a year!) This is even though I have my address on my web page.
My other addresses such as my business addresses, started getting spammed almost immediately after being set up, and now they get a deluge -- but my slumberland.seattle.wa.us address is immune. (Email to my old slumberland.com address gets forwarded to me, and it's 98% spam now as well.)
Recently I was looking at one of the spams that my other addresses get -- a spam to sell bulk email addresses. I noticed that the spam said something to the effect of "Our addresses are high quality -- we've weeded out all
A-HA!
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Why exactly is squatting bad? People buy property around cities not because they want to develop it, but because they think it will be valuable to other people that may want to develop it. Is this "squatting" as well, and is it bad? If not, how is it different than Domain Names?
at least Nate won't have to worry about a corportation trying to get his site. who would want oostendorp.net anyway? >=D
I post links to stuff here
Here in Australia they don't let anyone register a domain in the wrong area. You must be a registered business to get a .com.au, a registered network provider (eg isp) to get a .net.au (and there is someones overlap between the last two), or a registered not-for-profit organisation to get a .org.au.
.id.au, which is split up further into names like dropbear.id.au, wattle.id.au, and others. Each one of these subdomains has its own policies as to what they allow and disallow. Some charge, some don't.
For individual names, they have
This system isn't bad, I guess you could do worse.
http://www.id.au/id-au.html for more info.
You'll never understand it? Don't be so hard on yourself. When you type "blahblahblah" into your browser (and there's no machine of that name in your local domain), where's the first place your browser looks for it? Since the world has unfortunately been conditioned that most websites use "www." and ".com" as universal quotation marks, it's natural to just put your site's distinctive name right in the middle.
In Australia, they have a subdomain called .id.au for individual IDs... have only very rarely seen it used though.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
As long as you're not violating trademark law or extorting somebody domain names should be first come first serve. If an individual registers their surname as a domain name first its theirs, if a company registers their trademark as a domain name first its theirs. If somebody (a corporation, an individual or whatever) registers a domain name which is somebodies trademark and uses it to compete against them then the registrants rights to the domain name should be terminable.
Basically the way it should work comes down to a simple concept: Play fair. The way it presently works is also a simple concept: Carry the biggest stick.
In France I think everyone has full ownership of its name, which means you can call your business with your name and can't be sued even if it is a tradermark. I dunno how this would stand in a trial over a .com domain name, because the trial would take place in US with different trademarks laws. What a legal mess !
If I was a domain name squatter, I would look in a phone book, for people with the last name of the company I was going to poach the domain name from. Therefore, I would at least have a chance at winning a lawsuit, and could probably make a cut of the money if the domain name was sold. Just a potential way for cyber squatters to make money.
Some years ago, I had a brief acquaintance with a man named Walter Taylor. His family founded the Taylor Wine Company in Hammondsport New York, which was purchased by Pepsi-Cola. They manipulated the law, permitting them to import Algerian wine by the railroad car, and mix it with the legal minimum of New York state grapes and called the resulting garbage "Taylor" New York State wine. Walter founded the Bully Hill Vineyards, which is a small estate bottled wine in Hammondsport. Although he never attempted to use his name in conjunction with the product, Pepsi sued to prevent him using his name anywhere on the bottle. They won; the also lost. Walter's next wine was called "Goat White Wine" and featured an original woodcut of his on the lable of a goat sticking out his tongue. The label read, "they can take my heritage they can take my name but they cant get my goat!" and was signed "Mr. X, the Secret Proprietor of Bully Hill Vineyards." Such is reality.
People are in the mindset of lastname identity.
Heh, the same last name you share with countless relatives and strangers.
There should be a new internet domain hierarchy for family domains, personal web pages, etc (didn't this happen a while ago?). That should fix part of the problem.
I'm really surprised people haven't thought about fixing the problem instead of the symptoms. The web lends itself to hierarchical organization and this isn't taken advantage of as much as it should.
Now for the people who use some big companies name for their website and run some sort of commercial venture... you're on your own. It's part of business to research before you step into possible legal troubles. Counterpoint: you're a big enough company to go after a domain name withlegal muscle... how come you didn't do that a long time ago? You missed the boat.
That said, I also would like to see the littles guys treated as equally as the big companies.
(And squatting is a no-no.)
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
I tried looking for stephenson.com and stephenson.net a while back. Several companies have beaten me to them. In fact, one of those companies hosts my personal web site at jason.stephenson.net.
The whole domain name thing is a real mess. We need to come up with something completely different.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Let's see the corps try and stop that! From there I my son can legally get personalized licensed plates, pencils, phone book listings, etc. Muhahahaha!!
It appears that the real problem is that we are .ind for individuals, there are thousands
using domain names as a phonebook, or as a lookup.
We just have too many repeating names, for example,
who should get diamond.com? Diamond MultiMedia,
the jewler's association, or one of the thousand other
companies with diamond in the name?
Even if we used a
of people in the country with the same name as me, how do we resolve that?
Perhaps we should be civil and let everyone with a rational reason to need the domain name share it and have an index on that (page), then split off into sub-domains.
There are already a number of sites that do something similar.
One thing I will never understand is why so many non-commercial sites insist on a ".com" domain name. Most recently, I discovered my township has a web site - www.yourtaxdollarsatwork.COM. Jeez!
When I set up my (since closed) freeware site, I got a .ORG domain just to make clear that it was non-commercial.
While I don't agree that musician guy about removing don-henley.com from the web, I can't see why the other Mr. Henley needed a commercial domain name in the first place....
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Clear, Dark Skies
Actually it's $10/year for an email account. $20/year for a web account. It's actually not too bad of a service. A lot of people don't/can't handle the technical requirements or the cost of a domain name. Of course I can and I have my own domain so it doesn't apply to me. It does suck if you're slow though.
The only solution is to eliminate the top level domains. NSI currently encourages domain hoarding by offering you the .net and .org equivilents of .com. No matter how many other TLDs there are (.inc, .biz., etc), someone will be willing to pay $$$ to be xyz-dot-everything.
The same thing happens with telephone numbers. Everytime Bellcore comes out with a new toll-free area code, the same group of companies fight for the numbers that make their business name. Do you think that you can't call 1-{800,888,877)-ATT-INFO and get AT&T?
The reality is that people who are crazy about name identity will want to preserve it no matter where it is. Adding a zillion new TLDs and thinking otherwise is a pipe dream, and just pollutes DNS.
It's Jerry Sumpton again. Check WhoIs....
I wrote a script for a web interface to WHOIS, and while I was testing it, I found that none of the rational names I had ever considered were avaialable, and even among the nonsensical ones, I could only find one (CCCCCCC.COM, or "Seven C's") that was available.
A prime example of the test works like this: Concatenate any one letter, then a number from 1 to 99. Chances are, the domain is taken. I won't say none are available because I haven't tested them all, but I didn't find a single one while I was playing with it. I had to go back and add some code to strip unusable characters, then I would just pound about ten keystrokes into the text box.
Three and four letter domains, even nondictionary ones, are pretty much gone. I pulled up these examples:
GNZT.COM
RTWQ.COM
VGFM.COM
TEYU.COM
JRGT.COM
We need new TLD's -- in fact, wasn't there supposed to be a umber of them in place two years ago? I remember *.NOM, *.FIRM, *.WEB, and mayber more, I think. For some reason, Bill Clinton keeps holding this up for one reason or another on his Internet "agenda"...
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E2 IN2 IE?
The name http://oget.nu/ is available and in french it means 'oget naked' which is a real cool site name. Well. If you are oget that is.
Laurent
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Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
my name is already taken...
meanwhile, you could claim that your name is a trademark, since you use it whenever you do work... And that would be the point of a trademark...
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
I remember several cases of "S Hussein"s in Australia getting harrassing phone calls. :-\
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
I know it sounds bad to say this, but if the party that doesn't own the name really, really, wants it, they should start talking money, not court.
The U.S. legal system heavily favors the wealthy -- it doesn't matter if you're wrong or right. You could be dragged through different court for years even if the complaint is halfassed at best. Most individuals don't have the time and financial resources to put up with this crap and eventually give in. Microsoft has killed companies doing this, but it's all legal under U.S. law. God bless america...
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E2 IN2 IE?
One of the big problems with this type of suit is the excessive financial burden of defense. Whether the person wins or not, they typically still have to pay their legal bills.
There have been some high-profile successes against companies in the past (ajax.org, veronica.org, avery.net/dennison.net, etc.), but far more common is the silent, unpublicized acquiescence to business interests. When the defendent is a non-profit interest like ajax.org or veronica.org, public pressure can help avoid the need for a costly legal defense, as when Colgate-Palmolive dropped their suit for ajax.org after receiving a petition from slashdotters.
But for-profit interests don't have it so easy, and there are hundreds of cases currently under dispute or litigation. I've chatted with defendents in the midst of lawsuits whose legal bills are in the $30,000-$50,000 range, with stacks of depositions and other legal papers measuring a meter or two in height. These aren't surname domains, but would normally be considered generic phrases or business names; see http://www.goofoff.com for one example (a chemical company, Lilly Industries, has a trademark for a product called "Goof Off.")
When "victory" means paying $100,000 to keep using the domain name you already "own," accepting defeat from the start is the most attractive option for many individuals and small businesses.
Dude, you can imagine how I feel.
I wanted to register my last name, but this computer company I've never heard of already has it. It totally stinks.
Jonathan Apple
aka
It would also be nice if you could guess a business' phone number from its name. This is obviously impractical - there are way too many businesses with phones for this to work.
Similarly, it may not be long before there are way too many businesses with web pages for their names to be guessable. It works now to some degree but there are already problems. I wanted some information on Pioneer DVD players the other day, so I went to www.pioneer.com and got a website for a business with no relation to Pioneer electronics but with just as much right to the domain name. Many domain names are guessable only because a large corporation took ownership of the domain from a legitimate owner by blatant extortion.
In my opinion people are going to have to give up the idea of guessable URLs very soon.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
...i'm just borrowing it. i can't say i'm very sympathetic. i haven't a chance in *hell* of owning my domain name. - d. christ
It seems to me that these problems wouldn't be an issue if people would register domains as they should. The big three top-level domains were created with a specific purpose/market in mind. .com should be registered for corporations and for-profit endevours (.com as in company). .org should be registered or organizations - non-profit, big-name organizations (like the American Cancer Society, Red Cross, etc), as well as the Triange Area Spider Silk Knitting Circle. .net are for network providers - ISPs and those they provide for.
.org and .per(.ind, whatever) would be less expensive (or free, provided you keep up the paperwork), while .com and .net could be more expensive - which companies could afford to pay because they save all the money they're spending now going around suing people for domain names/trademark infringement!
If people would register like this, it would make life far less confusing. As well, it would be nice if people *could* easilly register their local area domain name (ie: mur.rdu.nc.us) or even better, an individual or personal top-level domain address (mur.ind or mur.per or mur.tmd - this is my domain) which was specifically designed for personal web pages. Now, if they did something like this, they cold even stratify domain registration fees depending on the top-level domain you want -
I registered and have been using the name easel.com in good faith; now a company that makes an "easel" line of clothing is disputing my rights to it. Their prior trademark on the word "easel" involves clothing, my site contains art and a children's advent calendar. Does this make sense? More info at easel.com
This is baloney! Let he with the most piercings get the domain!! AJ: You the man. - An Anonymous Gaussie (Folks, I am not just saying this because he links my exploits archive on his page)
I know of a company who is reserving last names under the ".md" domain. The service was originated to give personalized names to doctors, but anybody can register. So you are essentially registering a subdomain. I.e. they own "taylor.md" but they are selling first names on a first come first serve basis. This way if my name is tom taylor I can reserve tom.taylor.md, if tom is taken I could get thomas.taylor or tom.r.taylor.md, etc. email is purchased seperately, but is reserved if you signup for a name and would be in the form: "tom@taylor.md" the URL is Z.md
Too bad he didn't force the change. Or at least have demanded royalties for use of the name.
It's not that I have anything against large corporations per se. It's that I have a problem with large corporations setting their lawyers upon the small when the large company is in the wrong. It's a form of extortion, and I'd like to see them hammered hard for it.
There is an online petition being conducted to have the legal action stopped against the don-henley.com site. Please sign it!
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Ok.. here's my domain woe story... .org and .net.. but he still has the .com.. grrr)
ok.. My school starts an internet program.. we get our computers late and get delayed on buying the domain. Some dood who owns a two-bit local computer repair shop buys the domain (has nothing to do with his business) obviously just to use the name to increase traffic to his business. I e-mail him saying how we wanted to the domain for school, yadda yadda yadda... he says if we put a banner on the page he'll let us use the domain. I say whatever just so I can get the domain..I agree (all this is being done by e-mail). I submit the change request, and I'm not down for technical, zone, administration, billing, and replaced his registration address with mine. Now... I told the school they could do this deal with the guy and use the domain (I neglected to mention I already went ahead with it) and they decided they couldn't do it because it would be like a coperate sponser, yadda yadda yadda... now the guy wants his domain back; I really still want the domain. From the start I felt he shouldn't be able to have it since it's the first two words of the school's name.. it has nothing to do with his business (besides the fact he's in the school district), and he just bought it to increase traffic to his company. Do I or the school have any legal right to stop him from thinking he's allowed to have it? does he even still have any precedence since he transfered the domain to me? can he sue me? was a contract by e-mail legal? (also since I'm a minor?) What can/should I do!? (Domain games SUCK! I also had another incident where a pharmacutical company had a domain in limbo that I wanted, and after it was freed and before I got it.. some guy bought it.. and used it for webhosting just like I wanted to do! so I bought up the
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
Spelled reznoir.. :)
IANAL, but my father is.
My understanding is that trademarks typically only apply to the specific trade that it is associated with. For example, you might be able to use the term "FooBars", even if it's trademarked by a certain company, if the context you're using it in doesn't create confusion.
There are sometimes exceptions on very well known trademarks like "McDonalds". But I don't think that "Henley" or "Reznor" are very well known trademarks. I've never heard of either of them before.
Besides, these people have a legal right to use their names, unless their name happens to be McDonald and they're using it in the CONTEXT OF A TRADEMARK. The Henley site is a personal site. The Reznor site appears not to be, but I honestly don't think that matters because I doubt that Reznor is selling the same thing as whatever it is that Thomas & Betts sells.
I guess these companies are just hoping that the people won't be able to afford a lawyer to defend the proper use of their names.
Some woman e-mailed me once, saying that my domain name was a ploy to get children lured to my site, where I would provide inappropriate content to subvert their minds. She even fired off a letter for the dude that writes "Where's Waldo," encouraging him to sue me.
I get this stuff every few weeks. I'm yet to get sued, but I figure it's only a matter of time.
A fellow by the name of Jerry Sumpton registered every family name he could back in 1996 and has been squatting on them ever since. He claims to host over 12,000 domains, renting the family names to individuals ($10/mo for email, $20/mo for web hosting). Quite a scam, although it's hard to believe that he gets many suc^H^H^H customers at those prices.