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Trademark Cyberpiracy Prevention Act
The House will probably vote next week on HR3028, the
Trademark Cyberpiracy Prevention Act.
The intention is to prevent "bad faith" squatting on trademarked domain names; penalties go up to $100,000. This would definitely put an end to domain-name speculation. Isn't
ICANN
supposed to be deciding these issues?
I'm sure this will get moderated to flamebait, but I really believe it so...
While there is certainly a lot of problems with the US Congress, at least they are elected, unlikely the incompetent, power hungry bozos that run ICANN. Esther Dyson? You're killing me. To say nothing of the possible illegality of their working with the White House to lobby for more funds. I'd much rather have a democratic body running things than some nameless, faceless bureaucratic cabal.
Why is this such a big deal? If you don't want to pay how much the squatter is asking--don't!
Domain names (until now) have been a perfect example of hands-off capitalism (I hate trying to spell French words).
The only slightly annoying thing happening is that squatters can register a whole slew of names at once without paying. Easy fix for that: payment required at registration time.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I've been trying to get laws passed against "bad faith squatters" for years..
Can anyone point me to an online list of US trademarks so I can check if various domains are trademarked or not?
Thanks, GoodPint.
As much as I hate the goverment getting involved
in this the bill not that bad.
You have to have intentions of bad faith. meaning
you can have any available domain name as long as you don't try to make money off the trademarked company. i.e John Mcdonald could have McDonald.com
but if he uses it to sell a product people may think come from the McDonald corp. he could be sued.
At least thats how I read it.
Hello! I am Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die
"bad faith"
how's that for vague.
Have you seen Ironstayn vs Supergovernment yet?
If this is a US criminal offence, presumably I as a European can still squat? Or can I be extradited for it???
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
Does this mean that squatters who offer their domains for sale will have to use the domain themselves or lose it? Its hard to understand that Gov-Speak.
The wait for tech support doubles every 18 months... Any likelihood they can solve your problem halves. Foosters
Granted, I've not read the bill yet, but with the hip buzzword "Cyber-" in the bill title, I already have serious doubts as to how in touch with reality this bill actually is.
If they can't avoid cliches like that, what faith can I have that they'll be any better off in the "business end" of the bill?
Squatting was bad but the only thing the system lacked was some limitation on quantity and maybe some objective faith checking would also be appropriate.
Now companies with registered trademarks will go over the little guy that use his nickname years ago to do an original thing. It's not the little guy's fault if the companies lacked vision in the past but it's not the little guy that did the lobbying to get that thing going.
The Federal TM database can be searched in person at 2900 Crystal Drive, 2nd Floor, Arlington, Virginia. No online version is available yet. Many law offices keep updated copies on CDROM.
/cgi-bin/trade-marks/search_e.pl.
Canadian trademarks can be searched over the web at: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca
For other countries, I have no information. A web search might reveal more options.
As a European, yes, you can have your domain seized. Network Solutions is bound by US law, as per their agreement with the NSF.
IMHO the idea sounds great but alot of people who are crying foul over domain names vs. "trademark" names should remember: Most laws being passed on the internet are fairly new and since the beginning of the Inet, there was no authoritative source to govern actual disputes. Seems people have also forgotten that ICANN is running out of funding for their organization as well.
-----------snip to legalities--------------
This Paragraph sets forth the type of disputes for which you are required to submit to a mandatory
administrative proceeding. These proceedings will be conducted before one of the administrative dispute resolution service providers listed at (each, a "Provider").
a. Applicable Disputes. You are required to submit to a mandatory administrative proceeding in the
event that a third party (a "complainant") asserts to the applicable Provider, in compliance with the
Rules of Procedure, that
(i) your domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights; and
(ii) you have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and
(iii) your domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith.
So what exactly determines bad faith? Does this mean if I thought up the name personaljunk.com and registered it, it can be yanked if I didn't have the money to trademark it, and then some corporate bigwig went ahead and decided: "Golly gee Wally, I want that domain since I have money and personaljunk sounds like a moneymaker." hypothetical situation obviously
Who is going to determine this? Certainly not congress. They have enough issues chasing script kiddies defacing senate.org. Who's going to monitor corporate bullies? ICANN? What happens if/when ICANN runs out of money? The domain registrars? The ones who don't collaborate on issues such as NSI?
In the administrative proceeding, the complainant must prove that each of these three elements are
present.
b. Evidence of Registration and Use in Bad Faith. For the purposes of Paragraph 4(a)(iii), the following circumstances, in particular but without limitation, if found by the Panel to be present,shall be evidence of the registration and use of a domain name in bad faith:
(i) circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name; or
(ii) you have registered the domain name in order to prevent the owner of the trademark or service mark from reflecting the mark in a corresponding domain name, provided that a pattern of such conduct has been established on your part; or
(iii) you have registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of disrupting the business of a competitor; or
(iv) by using the domain name, you have intentionally attempted to attract, for commercial
gain, Internet users to your web site or other on-line location, by creating a likelihood of
confusion with the Complainant?s mark as to the source, sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of your web site or location or of a product or service on your web site or location.
Very general rules which once again brings me to this issue who will monitor corporate bullies... eg: clue.com
Want Root?
So Congress came up with the Internet in the 1930s? Why didn't they tell anyone about it?
It stands for "Crazy Young Burnouts Eating Rice".
Little known fact, it was origionally going to be "Computor Logistics In Trouble Or Regulating Information Systems"...
Killing spammers is too good for them.
The centralized, legalized, buerocratized, and generally screwed DNS system is the biggest problem with the Web at the moment. It is unbelievable that we have to put up with this stupidity, in what should be the most flexible and changeable of mediums.
DNS is great for email, at least when the address has to exchanged in meatspace, but other then for billboards, its doing nothing but strangling the web.
If you read Tim BL's original report for CERN on the Web, he notes that the real reason for creating it was to get away from inefficient centralized keyword systems. Well, here we are, ten years later, and the web has become a keyword based system, albeit with a rather odd syntax (www.keyword.com).
Domain napping is obviously not a good thing, and I don't think there is anyone here who isn't pissed off a the companies that buy up hundreds of domains to try to auction them off later: but having vague intention (goodwill or badwill) based laws enacted to govern over the web is so much worse.
As I see it there are two good options:
a) The unlimited, non-exclusive TLD (Top Level Doamain) system. This has been proposed on Slashdot before, and would mean allowing anybody to register a new TLD, but for nobody to own one. So microsoft could create
This would work for solving the immediate problem, but is still a centralized system, with all the problems of that (Micro~ suing anyone registering a microsoft.* domain for example). Which is why I advocate:
b) Toss DNS out altogether. OK, this won't happen, but as the transfer of addresses in meatspace becomes more rare, I think it makes sense. If you want to find a large webpage, services like Google work fine, and for everything else there is the good old link. The ultimate decentralized namespace has already been invented: its name is Hypertext.
-
Ok, yeah I know that there are alot of people out there who are only in it for themselves. But what about the little guy? I own a small internet company and we have already been pursued by a major corporation for Trademark infringement. They got all upset when we registered another domain name to try and increase traffic to our site. Not only were the demands to hand over the domain name made then rename our site, and they threatened lawsuit. In the mean time we have also filed for our own Trademark. The thing is, will this be enough to keep us from having to pay up major $$ just because some moron in a robe decides we should. Not to mention that the major companies Trademark is only pending and has not been approved yet. Talk about a heaping load of that brown smelly stuff.
Some jerks got the family names of practically everybody. Try it: http://www.yourfamilyname.com or http://www.yourfamilyname.org. I wonder if a class action lawsuit could recover my family name and take it out of their control? I can't help feeling outraged -- somehow it's not right that they should make money out of our names.
now there's a good idea, lets make the internet useable only by idiots and those with photographic memories.
I know that if I want to go to the kodak site ( just an example ) I can type "www.kodak.com" and get there.
using your suggestion, I would either
a: have to go to a search site first ( by the way, how do I get there without a name )
or
b: have some cryptic xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx number memorized.
or
c: have already been there and bookmarked it ( again, how would I get there in the first place )
for the internet to be of any use at all to anyone other than complete geeks, it must be "meatspace" friendly.
come up with a friendlier solution than DNS and you might have a chance.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
A friend of mine once told me that there are at least two companies in the world with the name "Gap"-- the American fashion outlet, and a European hardware company.
The European company registered gap.com first, and the American company went to InterNic about this. In the end, the American company got gap.com because InterNic was American and had to respect American trademarks.
I don't know if this story is true or not, but it presents a situation which may very well occur or be exacerbated if U.S. trademark law is amended as in the article. Currently, trademarks are registered and honoured only on a per-country basis. But the Internet and domain names cover the whole world. The problem is that this amendment appears to assume that domain names registered in any country by a trademark holder from any country must abide by American trademark law.
I wonder if it's possible to prevent American domain name servers from using certain foreign domain names that would violate U.S. trademark law. That might be a good compromise.
I realize the Internet is, effectively, an American invention, but as long as the U.S. is sharing it with the rest of the world, they should play fair.
Another (unrelated) problem: What if your last name is a trademark, you don't know it, and you register it as a domain name? Or worse, your last name isn't a trademark, you register it, and sometime afterward, a company registers that trademark and sues you?
the canadian (.ca) domain registation process pretty much eliminates the issue of 'domain squatting & profitering' by requireing organizations to have a registered corporation.
.ca domain.
.com sillyness.
.ca (or province.ca domain, there is no charge for the registration of your domain name!
if you have a provincially registered comapany, you can get a geographic domain name in your province. ie: yourdomain.mb.ca
if you have a federally incorporated company, you can get a
since it costs a few hundred bucks (minimum) to crete a corporation in canada, it is (almost) impossible to get away with all of this
oh yeh. if you meet the requirements for a
pretty simple way of dealing with the issue before it becomes a problem no?
I'm not certain on this next point, but I seem to recall that you cannot infringe on existing trademarks when you register your domain name. can anyone confirm/deny this?
gunderwo@hotmail.com
The biggest problem people have with trying to sell information is that there is a limitless supply -- treating it like property just doesn't work (value=demand/supply, supply=infinity, value=0).
However, in the case of DNS entries, it actually *does* work as property (value=demand/supply, supply=some fixed amount, value!=0). The funniest part of this is that people suddenly don't *want* to treat it as property!
The whole concept of "squatting" as somehow Bad is very silly. If I "squat" on some land next to a city, someone that wants to build a business on that land must purchase it, even if I just let it sit there "unused" (although waiting for its value to rise is a perfectly legitimate use). This makes perfect sense and is seen as a very reputable trade.
However, in the case of DNS entries, which seems to me to be exactly the same, people don't like this anymore.
The problem isn't with people "squatting" on DNS entries, the problem is that people seem to think that they "own" the name. The idea of owning a name, owning a bit of information, is silly. It's completely fictional and requires extreme duct-tape to make sort of functional. For a long while we could sorta do it because duplication was kinda expensive and not many people wanted to do it so the makeshift legality wasn't too heinous. But those days are over. It never made sense to treat information as property, and now it doesn't even work a little bit.
As long as we have this fictional and totally unnecessary concept of Intellectual Property, there will always be cases like this. People will claim ownership over the technique of storing credit card information on their servers for "1 click" service, for the transfer of music files over the internet, for using the XOR function to blit and remove images to the screen. As long as IP exists, we'll be battered with one after another absurdity.
Intellectual Property was a bad idea to begin with, and it's only getting worse.
This is one of those moments when one sees who really makes the decisions in this country because I don't remember the public expressing much concern over this issue. What has happened are a few select companies have lobbied the shit out of congress. That's all there is to it. Anything they want they get. Democracy my ass. I think we should rename our government structure to the more accurate: "Corporate Lobbyocracy".
You think they'd reserve a word like "Cybersipracy" to something a little less trivial...
Thanks for that.
...
Given that definition, bad faith domain name "squatting" would have to intentionally defraud someone - presumably the company claiming rights to the name; or be intended to mislead someone - presumably the customers of said company.
Domain name registration is an honest capitalistic venture in that a private citizen can forsee an existing or (even better) soon-to-be-created entity's desire to use the Internet to conduct business and/or advertise. If that company is so blind to the Internet's potential for commerce that they have not already registered the domain, they deserve to pay the person who forsaw that potential.
Unless the registrant claims to be the entity which owns the servicemark or trademark, how could they be guilty of misleading someone?
I hope this doesn't pass, because the legitimate business of domain anticipation will be lost.
-- Kickin it in Irene
As I'm sure has been said many times, that's all a domain name is, an address.
The fact that Microsoft's headquarters are on Microsoft Way doesn't make it illegal for there to be a Microsoft Drive in Redmond (although the 911 people may not like it), nor does it make it illegal for a concern named The Software Company to have their offices on Microsoft Drive. It's easy to see how mail could be incorrectly delivered in this situation, but Microsoft does not, as far as I know, have a right to make The Software Company move. Nor could it have forced a neighborhood to change the name of its street from Microsoft Way so that Microsoft could use it.
As with snail mail addresses, no one should expect to have an easily remembered Internet address. A case in point: I had to look up Microsoft's address before I could use it in the example above. Before the Internet, people used Rolodexes and the like because they could not know all the street addresses and phone numbers they had reason to need; there is no reason they should expect to avoid the electronic equivalents, e-mail address books and browser bookmarks.
Make people pay up front to register domain names and there's no way they'll be able to squat on all the pleasant sounding ones. And a pleasant sounding domain name is the most anyone should expect to get. If you're good enough for people to want to do business with you, they'll find a way to remember your address.
I'm going to write my Congressdroids and tell them that I, at least, want them to give this one -- and all those like it -- a big thumbs down.
Jeff
Trademark owners have to defend their trademark or lose it, and unless you've sued every person you've met with the same last name, D'OH.
I. What does cybersquatting mean? What is `bad faith'? Come on, all we need is more fuzzy grey laws on the books in America. The justice system can't deal with black and white, how will they deal with fuzzy grey?!?
II. Should it be illegal? While were at it, should porn be illegal? It's bad for socity, contributes to the `moral decay' of America and clogs up a lot of bandwidth. However, it would be a violation of freedom of speech, and therfore shouldn't be illegal. Something might be bad and shouldn't be illegal.
III. Actually, when you think about it, isn't cybersquatting kinda like buying a peice of land and hoping to sell it for more? That's not illegal (and I don't know many who think it should be).
IV. While I may sound like a pro-cybersquatter, I'm not, I don't like them or what they do, I just believe in equal rights for all. Just beacuse the `vast majority' of America think's it's bad, shouldn't make it illegal.
V. However, I do think that if a company has a trademark and somebody get's their domain before they do, well, then they have the right to have that domian, al long as they have a registered trademark before the squatter buys the domain.
In conclution, I think it's wrong, yet not worthy to be illegal. I think a lot of slashdot (and the public at large) opposed government involvement in things, unless it will benefit them. We shouldn't think about what's good for us, but what is right. What would Thomas Jefferson (IMHO the greatest of the founding fathers) do?
That's my $(2^4*3+1/7%3*2/100)
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
And also on the violaters list must be Al Gore (for squatting on algoresucks.com, etc.) and George W. Bush. After all, squatting is squatting and rules must apply equally to everyone right?
This might seem drastic, capitalistic, and just plain wrong -- but how about raising the cost of a .com to $300/yr or more? After all, .com's addresses are meant for businesses, most of which would not blink at paying several thousand dollars for a property which is vital to their future -- as the market has shown. Leave .org's and .edu's alone, of course.
.com's are the haves, the .org's are the have-nots -- but come on! Keeping the current cost of registration is like minting a C-note and selling it for a dollar.
Sure, we then get away from the idea of equality -- the
Need to be taken out back and kicked in the laurels a few times.
.com,.net domains....is this supposed to happen? Ever since I can remember you're supposed to use the proper suffix, i.e. .co.uk, .com.au, etc. So far the .us suffix has been relegated to state governments here.
How many domain named are owned by somebody, even seemingly dumb ones, with absolutely no intent of them being used? Just start typing in random words as domain names into whois. Now take those and see who actually has a server at the other end with nslookup and/or ping. It's a little ridiculous. I recently did a bout of checking out possible domain names, and the numbers of domains like this astounded me.
There should be a clause in the NIC agreement:
Use it or lose it. 3 months to get *something* at that domain name (besides a 'coming soon' page from your registrar) or you lose it and your cash.
I don't care if it's a web site, a mail server, what have you. *Something* that operates in a useful capacity. (not just a 'ping server' either.)
As far as non-US companies/people registering in the
You can't go to the phone company and say 'I want to buy all the phone numbers from xxx-0012 through xxx-0102', can you? Well I suppose you could, but would they let you? Not unless you pay for the lines to go with it.
Blech. Signatures.
The analogy is flawed to begin with, but if we have to use it, it would be more akin to this:
All unused acres of land belong to the government, which sells that land at a fixed rate of $50 an acre. Company X owns 1 acre someplace, where their new corporate headquarters exists. An adjacent Acre Y lies between Company X and the nearest highway. There is a sign marked "Company X" on Acre Y. Squatter Z comes along and buys Acre Y between Company X's headquarters and the nearest highway at $50, before Company X had a chance to. Company X has little choice but to buy Acre Y from Squatter Z in order to efficiently reach the highway, and to keep people from being confused as they exit the highway seeing the sign marked "Company X" on the adjacent Acre Y. Squatter Z charges an obscenely high rate.
Do you think this is particularly fair? If Acre Y had been priced for what it was worth (what Company X had been willing to pay), or had been auctioned off, Squatter Z wouldn't have had a chance. Real estate today goes by market value. You cannot buy a piece of land and sell it next week for a 10000% profit.
If a domain name has little value when it is purchased, "speculating" is perfectly fine. Generic names like "business.com" and "shopping.com" I have no problem with people buying and trying to sell. When somebody takes the name of a KNOWN trademark, they are taking ADVANTAGE of the system by purchasing it for a value much less than what the domain is actually worth and re-selling it at that higher rate. It reeks of unethical business practice.
I work for a major legislative tracking firm: "bad faith" usually refers to doing something with intent to screw another: I don't really want bignametrademark.com, I only want it to force bignametrademarc Inc to have to pay me gobs of money for their righteous trademark. This is really an adjunct to the current trademark law and sort of frivelous, but it would serve to more clearly prevent the sort of domain name squatting abuses we've seen before, though _not_ ones like snaking myfamilyname.com. You've got no legal entitlement there.
As for non-Americans--it would only apply if you were squatting on an address and doing the regestration in the US. If you were to do an offshore non-com/org/net TLD, you'd be Kool and the Gang. This isn't just for this particular law--you are bound to conform with laws in the place you do business in either direction, one of the perils of international business.
Not that this is a legal interpretation--anyone looking for such here should look to get their head checked.
for the internet to be of any use at all to anyone other than complete geeks, it must be "meatspace" friendly.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
And since when is this the goal? What good has the soliciting of stupidity on the Internet done us anyways?
-
It seems that this should be construed as a form of ex post facto law.
Or am I missing something?
I don't know, man, "cyber" is hip these days. In another 4 or 5 years, I won't be an American anymore. I'll be an eAmerican. I'll vote via ePolls, I'll be held accountable for my actions by the eLegal System. And don't forget all of the eScandals we can look forward to by ThePresident.com. Anyone remember the Simon and Garfunkel tune where they proclaim that they've been "Rolling Stoned and Beatle'd till I'm blind?" Well, I'm being "E'd and dot commed into fucking submission." Bahhh.- ----------------
-----------------------------------------
I would have no problem getting rid of generic TLD's entirely and moving everything into country codes.
.us TLD is 100% geopolitical. In order to register Microsoft, you would have to put it at microsoft.redmond.wa.us, which is rather unwieldy, especially for those that don't know where MS's headquarters are.
.us were created, say .tm. Items trademarked at the national level would have reserved domain names amounting like "microsoft.tm.us." Things at more local levels would be handled like "bobs-garage.tm.mytown.tx.us." (or just bobs-garage.mytown.tx.us in the absense of a local trademark, assuming such a thing exists).
Unfortunately the
What if an additional subdomain under
Unfortunately, this doesn't cover the possibility of "dual" trademarks. AFAIK, some construction company can be named "Microsoft Construction, Inc.", for example, and might be just as entitled to that microsoft.tm.us domain. At this point I suppose it's possible to stick with the "first come, first served" policy and force subsequent registrants to modify the name slightly (e.g. microsoft-construction.tm.us).
Just some ideas..
I maintain my view that DNS names should have nothing to do with this - anybody should be able to register whatever name they can get to first, and DNS names should be taken out of the process for how endusers find sites on the internet. It's the name of a host, a server, it has certain restrictions which make it difficult to map over trademarked names (limited length, limited character-set, case insensitivity), not to mention the duplicity involved with the TLD names (.com, .gov, .mil, .org, .us, .etc).
Again: the endusers (99% of people surfing the net with your standard trusty web-browser), should NOT have access to the "location" field (for netscape, called "address" on IE), and instead should have a site-name field to enter stuff into. Then this data can go to a central trademark repository which acts as sort of a "yellow pages", maps to either their site's DNS or IP address, and zips the user to that site. Another layer of name-resolution, if you will. The actual http:// address should only be accesible to power users (who can configure that field to appear by going into the preferences dialog and checking a box).
This would eliminate the issues of squatting, TLD duplicity, and censoring (doodie.com). Such a repository could then be protected in the same way trade names have been for centuries without all these sticky issues.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Hey, I've got the same name as a famous shoe manufacturer, I sell software (I'm unrelated to them). We were both beat out by some really small time restaurant supply company. From both our perspectives, this peddler of used refrigerators is a squatter. He ain't doin' nuttin' wit' it, but waitin' for a payoff. Just force payment at registration.
Nobody said that the little guy is somehow entitled to more than the major corporations, nor did the post imply that the law should give "little guys" arbitrary preferences to supercede other laws.
As I read it, Ralman was simply complaining that his company, which presumably has a domain name of a legitimate nature (ie they're not squatters and don't believe they are infringing on the trademark), is being harassed by a major corporation that has a trademark similar to the domain in question. Said big company threatens a lawsuit in an attempt to coerce small company into giving up the domain name, regardless of whether the small company has the right to the name under the law. Being a small company, chances are they can't afford huge legal bills; big companies know that and use the threat of a lawsuit to force the "little guy" to give up profitable domain name(s). It *is* OK for everyone to pursue their own interests, but this "I can spend more money on lawsuits than you" coercion is *not* OK.
We don't have enough information to claim that the small company (or for that matter, the big company) is "on poor ethical ground". Registering multiple domains is no big deal, people do it all the time. If you sell Product X and Product Y, it's reasonable to expect you might register ProductX.com, ProductY.com, companyname.com, yadda yadda yadda. It's quite possible that the small and big companies in question have the same company name, and there maybe is where the dispute is coming about. If that's the case, then provided the companies are in different industries, then the big company's trademark may not entitle them to the domain.
>have some cryptic xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx number >memorized. I'll do ya one better. Why not just make the 'net all push-technology via government mandate and make the content entirely banner ads. It will please the morons, and pleasing the morons is what makes the world go round. *cough*
What about giving owners three months to prove use, and then making them post a $1000 escrow until they can prove use?
While I agree with the anti-regulatory sentiments of many, I can't stand the squatters. They're nothing but parasites and serve no useful purpose.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Domain name squatting is not "hands off" capitalism--it's rent seeking. Capitalism cannot exist with a background set of property rules and a state monopoly on violence to enforce them. The background property rules governing trademark provide that you can propertize a region of idea space by creating goodwill in association with a mark. Investing money in that property right to make more money is capitalism. Up until now, we've anomolously had a disjunction between what it takes to propertize idea space in domain name space versus the rest of the world. Normally, I have to invest in the goodwill of a mark by using it in commerce to get a property right. But in the domain name world, I just have to be the first to register it for, at most, a nominal fee. Acquiring a property right in domain-name space in hopes of exacting tribute from somebody who has already invested in a mark in the world of cans, billboards, and t-shirts, is not capitalism, it is rent seeking. The current practice of domain name registration is, if anything, anticapitalist. It lets a quasi-public entity extract a portion of the goodwill-value of a mark from the owner in the form of the domain name, transfer it to an arbitrary person by means of an arbitrary procedure, and sanctions that arbitrary person's attempt to seek payment from the owner to get back its own goodwill. This law merely seeks to annex domain-name space to the rest of idea space. It doesn't interfere with capitalism, and it looks like a good law.
The real issue here is that the courts came up with a highly questionable interpretation of the law when they said that domain names were not protected by trademark. (If you are going to argue with me, please read up first on what a trademark is, why it is granted, and what consitutes infringement. If you do so, you may find you really don't have any disagreement.)
When congress disagrees with the way the courts interpret a law it is their duty to enact new legislation that makes the intent of the laws clearer to the courts.
This is our system in action, no more and no less.
JK
Not at all!
First of all, "the spec" would have to change, and all browsers would have to be modified. The browser automatically sends your request to the search site (default one built in, user configurable - but this really ought to be a central, legally answerable entitiy, like a trademark registry).
Second of all, DNS doesn't necessarily have to go away. The browser can be modified to let power users configure it so they can look up any site by DNS, if that's what they want, instead of keyword.
Sites like TeleBung.com don't need to exist at all. TeleBung Corporation can register their trademark, which automatically gives them rights to the "TeleBung" keyword, which is a lot easier to legally defend than Telebung.com, telebung.net, telebung.org, or telebungsux.com etc. ad infinutum ad nauseum. Telebung Corp. may opt to not even HAVE a DNS name, and map the TeleBung keyword straight to an IP address instead. Either way it solves all the problems of the current round-peg/square-hole situation.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I am one of the other partners in the same compnay as Ralman...I thought I would attempt to clarify our position for you all since the devil is in the details and it seems that in the case the details have a say in the right or wrong.... Here is what happened... We bought the Company in March...around May sometime we get an Email from this lawyer at "Giant Mega Corp" saying that they have a trademark on a certain word...(actually the trademark as filed is on a combination of words)..our company having the same name as their trademark(actually is a pending trademark and not on exactly the same name)...around the same time as they contacted us we submitted to grab the .org and .net domainnames for our service(the name supposedly in trademark conflict) as we wished to better promote the site by having users able to "servicename".org or .net...the "Giant Mega Corp" was not at that time using that name as a domainname, they didn't own it, they have since purchased the "servicename".com domain... If antone wishes I will post the defense letter we sent them as it explains all this in more detail
The rules that apply to physical property don't have to apply here; domain space that isn't being used isn't the same as unused land unless we can't figure out some more intelligent way to make use of the thought space that the internet represents.
Admittedly, this is a optomistic view of how the net could be. Now that control of the net is moving to the courts it is probably doomed anyway; property rights have a lot of intellectual inertia in this culture.
That having been said, I am not neccesarily opposed to ownership of domains for the purpose of selling them, althought it would be nice if folks that had domains for this purpose could hold onto them in an undeveloped state (pointing to a coming soon page or whatever) for a limited amount of time. There is nothing worse than seeing a good domain name that you have a cool idea for sit around waiting for a $10,000 check.
I've got a project I'm working on called Jao.
It's been in the works for a couple of years, but we recently decided to rewrite it (previously neither the code nor the interface were very usable by people other than us) and open up the source under the GPL or something similar. (This should be at a releasable state before the year is out)
Although it's not really necessary, it would be EXTREMELY nice to have the domain jao.org as the homepage for the project.
Since it's a 3 letter domain, of course someone's squatting on it. Even if I had an extra $5k (what they're asking) that I couldn't think of anything better to do with, I wouldn't want to give it to a domain squatter, on principle.
My impression of the current situation is that I have two choices - pay up, or get a different address. Are there any other options? Will registering this name as a trademark make any difference, given that there are no hosts in the jao.org domain?
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
You apparently haven't bought a crap piece of land and then had a MegaMall decide it's a good place to locate. I've seen it happen several times. Dozens of people get scraped off their land like crap off the developer's shoe, getting a moderate premium over the pre-development land value if they're lucky. Local governments always seem to see things the developers way. I don't wonder why.
Exactly, except the difference would be that .tm items would *have* to be registered as a trademark at the level they're registering. AFAIK, .co.uk is effectively the same as .com. This would have the benefit of more or less *forcing* companies to act within the scope of their market and no further. There would never be competition for domains between the Corner Store in Hickville (corner-store.hickville.tx.us) and the national Corner Store, Inc. chain (corner-store.tm.us).
.us domain, .co.us = Colorado. But yah, the general idea is the same.
Plus, since two-letter state abbreviations are already given priority under the
THis is FAR too open to abuse. A trademark/copyright owner can quash any criticism by invoking this.
Imaging if I ran the web site, www.microsoft.sucks.fat.pps.com.
If MS got a sympathetic judge then could shut me down AND have my financially ruined through this. This can't be allowed to happen.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
See www.fecher.com for details.
Doug Ward - dsward@cei.net
Blank page with penguin on it, banner adds with links to porn sites. THere you go, you're using the domain, and making extra cash on the side to boot. Now if only I can get it link on slashdot...
I think a good way to solve trademark issues would be to create a domain like "tm.us" that only US trademark holders could register. Microsoft would have the address "microsoft.tm.us" for example. If a trademark is only registered in a state (can this be done?), you could have an address like "company.state.us". The .com, .org, and .net domains were intended for worldwide use, and should not be subject to laws of any country.
"Capitalism cannot exist with a background set of property rules and a state monopoly on violence to enforce them."
On the contrary, REAL "hands-off" capitalism is just the opposite of the above. The situation now is that the state favors business (by registering and defending things like trademarks and patents). The current domain naming situation removes this unnatural strictures and gives the property to the quickest applicant.
This is exactly the reason I don't object to anti-trust laws: they just restore (some of) the unbalance of power that already exists in our capitalist system. Monopolies would be far less likely to exist if it weren't for the trademark and patent offices.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
You should put the little TM next to Jao(tm) every time you use it. And, if you do actually register it, you'll need to use the little R-in-circle. The point of this is basically that you need to treat your name like a trademark (hence all the receipts above) and you need to further prove that you treat it like a trademark by telling the world that you consider it to be one, and you need to tell anyone else who comes along and uses it or anything similar that they may not.
The law requires that you make the effort to prove that you really do consider this name to be yours and that you closely identify it with your business, and that your customers do to.
[note: guess I need a disclaimer here? Jao(tm) is a trademark of Jao Software.]
"Bad faith" is vague enough that I could see this easily becoming just another tool for corporate world to push around the little guy. Would father of Veronica really have said no to Archie Comics if he had to go to court to prove he was using his daughter's name in "good faith" or risk loosing $100,000? To make this worse, some companies have just about everything under the sun trademarked. A nice CS 101 project would be to write a program that picks letters at random and see how long it take before it forms a random set of character which would violate a trademark. Add on translation of trademarks to other languages and the first letter in each word of a trademark, you pritty much and the majority of possiblities covered by some company or another. To push things over the edge is companies that need to own their trademark under every possible major US domain (com, net, org). Under this law, would American Airlines be able to threaten Alcoholics Anonymous for use of aa.org? Why isn't there a major US domain for the rest of us who would like to have our own domain name without paying to trademark it as well?
What happens when there are two companies called TeleBung, in different countries? Country domains were intended to prevent things like this, but few people are using them. Keyword registries (like NetWord) already exist, but the DNS system was designed to prevent the problems associated with them.
Forgive me for my lack of details, but it was a while ago and I'm a bit under the weather at the moment.
IIRC, this was tried maybe a year ago, it was a browser plug-in that allowed you to type specific keywords and take you to the site that matched those keywords closest. It wasn't really a search engine, more like a commercial replacement for DNS. They charged the site owners to register the keywords with them, and since it was a private company, they had full control over who got which name.
In essence it comes down to whoever had the most $$ would win the dispute, which does no better since it redirects the control from who thought the name up first to who has more money (which, mho, is worse than the current situation).
I can see how this may not fit your concept exactly, but it was pretty close, and a basically unstable business model (considering I've heard nothing about them for quite some time). Perhaps someone who remembers the service more clearly can clue us in, be interesting to pop over to their site and see whats going on (IE: see if they've thrown in the towel yet, or what their business plan du jour is).
A different system that is more fair to all would be appreciated, and I would be among the first to support it. As soon as someone contemplates one, let me know.
So real capitalism is no property rules, and everybody using whatever means are in their power to protect what they have amassed in their control? That's not capitalism--that's anarchy.
You don't really believe that--you say so. You think that those who are first-in-time to register a domain name should have a property right in it that a big corporation with a trademark should pay for if it wants to use it, as opposed, say, to sending somebody over to kill you if you don't. First-in-time is just another property rule, and one that often works well with unclaimed resources. It happens to be the rule that we apply to trademarks in the rest of the world. There's just a different criterion on what it means to be first--"use in commerce" instead of "register with a government sponsored monopoly."
Being the first to put "Coke" on a bottle gives me the right to put "Coke" on a can, or a building, or a t-shirt, and to prevent you from doing so even if it occurs to you first. Why shouldn't it also give me the right to put it on a domain name, and prevent you from doing so? Why are domain names so different that the first-in-time clock should start running again for them?
Mal, your sig belies your leanings.
,,umm,,,malcontent.
.rec .comp .biz, whatever will make this issue even more important. .org .com
Do unto others what has been done to you
Which quickly leads to death and
Do under others as you would have them do you.a.k.a. the "Golden Rule"
I like cybersquatting, but I think that sometimes it crosses the line. Most of the cases I've seen so far have been pretty fair, IMHO. It's easy to raise a ruckus nowaways. Most of the good ones are taken. Of course the new addition of
try freshmeat.net
Should be interesting...
+&x
Payment at registration is now required by Network solutions (this changed late last month). There is no longer any 6 month delay. Plus if someone does not register under their real name then no real person owns the domain and, in a simple legal move, the ownership of the domain by such person is unenforceable.
I do not see why corporate types are unwillingly to use the very sufficient, existing trademark laws to protect their intellectual property. Why do they have to introduce police state type legislation?
At one time, all unused acres of land DID belong to the government. Much of Michigan's...
*cough*Indians*cough*
Eventually, the people will buy up all the domain names.
hmmm...lets see 40?(chars)^26 = 4.503599627370496e+41 (calc)
* $35/year = $1.5762598695796736e+43/year. I don't think the species can make all the payments...
(+-1 Nitpick)
+&x
Great. So, because a few big corporations go whining to Capitol Hill, domain squatting gets put on the fast track. I'm not at all a fan of domain squatting, but it's been -- what? -- three years now, and how many pieces of anti-spam legislation have made it out of committee, let alone a Congressional vote?
I think it's pretty clear where our "representative's" priorities lie. "Custom Legislation, at Reasonable Prices."
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Asset taxation resolves this sort of problem. Who is defending the property rights of those who stake claims? Require speculators to pay for the protection of their claims and all of a sudden people stop making absurd speculative claims.
Seastead this.
Domain names are not different. Current trademark law already protects companies from domain name squatters. If you don't believe this, look at case law on the subject from the last 4 years.
There's no need for this extra legislation.
Again, there is NO NEED FOR THIS EXTRA LEGISLATION!!!!
It only makes it easier for a large corporation (such as Microsoft) to fuck a little guy for having a good idea first, but not having the legal manpower (read: $) to back it up.
See Microsoft and Windows2000.com. Registered in 1996, this domain (well in advance) preceded M$ decision to let its OS assembly line slip in production once again so that it had to rename its OS to Windows2000. Does microsoft own the trademark windows? Maybe. Actually, not really since it is f*cking generic. I'm sitting next to three (3) windows right now, and M$ didn't have thing to do with them. I look outside and I see people.
Windows were a concept first introduced to the computer world at large by Apple computers (and they were called just that, windows), first with Lisa & then with the Macintosh Operating System (now called MacOS). Apple borrowed this idea from previous work, but the previous work was non-commercial. M$ stole the work from Apple for the simple reason that Apple made a product with this work, licensed use of this work to M$ for use in writing programs for Macintoshes, and then M$ turned around and bit Apple in the *ss by coming out with its own OS based on the concepts that it had learned within the legally-binding relationship of a non-disclosure (and thus non-use except as specified) by Apple.
Well, I'm way the f*ck off topic, but the current trademark laws are sufficient, and there is no need to give police power to corporate America. They're got enough power as it is.
Microsof t pays congress to cut the Department of Justice's budget
"Where do you want to go tomorrow?" How about to court?
MSoft Throws Up Hands over 'Palm' -- Sort of
Micro$oft f*cks GoldTouch Technologies
As far as customer goodwill, does Microsoft have any?
The whole cybersquating (am I the only person who hates any word starting with cyber that's used by the media) debate is a complete non-issue. Your average web session involves about .001% typing in URLs and 99.999% clicking links and bookmarks. What the difference between www.brucewillis.com and www.bruce.willis.com is beyond me. I can keep coming up with alternatives all night www.bwillis.com, www.actor.bruce.willis.com. At $100 bucks a pop I doubt any of your *cough* cybersquaters will be able to keep their little game going long.
But lawyers need something to do and people now believe www.brucewillis.com should belong to the actor or *maybe* some other guy named Bruce Willis and www.bruce.willis.com might as well be a porn site. One of those domains is magical because it has none of those dashes or extra periods us nobodys use!
So what happens when Bruce Willis does get his way? Will Willis engineering have to fire anyone named Bruce so he doesn't create a machine named bruce.willis.com or make bruce@willis.com? Court order to change your username anyone?
If you really wanted to get to the Bruce Willis site, make your flipper type in a decent search engine and be done with it. I don't see why the online community should let anyone with enough cash demand their name/trademark between the magical www. and the holy .com. Its now become a yuppie trophy to get these domains and the law will follow the money.
Solution? Quit paying them a million dollars a pop and they will slowly disappear. Then we can do the same to the paparazzi and make Bruce really happy.
I don't see why companies don't use the slashdot effect to rid themselves of squatters. It is like that old altavista thing. Call your site www.trademark.somethingirrelevent.com ( ie www.altavista.digital.com), people start using www.trademark.com, web admin get complaints from consumers, servers get bogged down, to much info down the wires, cost goes up, squatter finally gets rid of web site for cheap. If the squatter puts something relavent to trademark on web site, rightful owner sues pants off. End of story.
Give it up. The guys letter has a valid point that .com is for commerical use. So save yourself the hassle and get another one. My I suggest fecher-family.org.
You can't retroactivly enact legislation
But that is exactly what this bill does:
SEC. 7. EFFECTIVE DATE. This Act shall apply to all domain names registered before, on, or after the date of enactment of this Act
Are the domain registrars based outside US subject to the same trademark regulations as Network "Solutions"?
Only one person can hold a domain. 10 people can have the same trademark--providing it's in 10 different industries.
.us domain, and the com/net/org domains are available to anyone worldwide.
Worse, there are lots of countries on the planet and they all have their own trademark laws. Nobody uses the
So what's the point in using trademarks? Just about any word or phrase is probably a trademark somewhere in the world.
This is just stupid.
I hope this doesn't pass, because the legitimate business of domain anticipation will be lost.
I hope it dose pass.
Rember Linux.com was registured to prevent abuse of the name. I've also heard a horror story where someone registured a domain just to sell it to someone he knew who wanted that same domain name.
The "Bad faith" standard won't even slow people who registure massive ammounts of domains just for resale and thats said becouse that practace is really annoying.
I don't actually exist.
go to the .us place. Anyone can get one, you just have to adhere to their naming convention, which I think is lame because i dont want to be named according to a geographical location (it doesnt have to be your geographical location, strangely).
Juln
I hope this law passes... I'de love to sue the shit out of the bastards who stole those two domains, and open them up to real kde people!!!!! Let's get em!!!
As is fitting for the man who "invented" it, Al Gore has taken his campaign to the Internet. So has Bill Bradley. But if you accidentally mistype Bradley's URL, you are redirected to Gore's site. Clever, yes?
Al Gore - www.algore2000.com.
Bill Bradley - www.billbradley.com.
Pseudo-Bill - www.billbradly.com.
a.) human writing is not restricted to ascii latin alphabet.
b.) bandwidth tripling goes multilingual faster than you think.
c.) the Internet is not property of the U.S. Congress.
a.) sure, a billion and a half people study english as lingua franca for biz, but they're not gonna tolerate ascii DNS. They'll route around censorship. (and you imperialist "english-only" drones out there will just have to deal with it.) But lighten up.. learning more language may enrich your life. 8P
b.) Moore's Law is a snail. Deal with it. Microprocessors quadruple performance/price ratio in 3 years. Bandwidth tripling yearly grows 27 times in 3 years. Internetworked, the microprocessors are far more powerful. And cell phones will be Internet devices in what, 5-8 years? People everywhere wanna communicate.
c.) The 'net is churning much faster than Industrial Age Institutions can adapt. Why rely on arms dealin', "peace"-keepin' Uncle Sam to regulate the 'net? Why rely on the authority of any one nation when there are hundreds of 'em? It's time we choose whether our national citizenships in fact preclude us from the right to be active citizens in an interdependent electronic world.
Me? I choose world, brothers and sisters. After all, ecommerce grows 35 times faster than the overall global economy. And the terms seem far more reasonable and responsible. Wealth in this churning world o'bits depends increasingly less on centralized power, coersion, violence, domination and more and more on ingenuity, imagination, cooperation, partnership. Isn't Open Source an prime example? Extrapolate the trend for 10-20 years..
Clearly we need new DNS. IMO the system should support "internet trademarks", thereby fostering *trust* in reputable info sources we use. And trust, reputability, (and verification) aren't concepts unique to the English language or latin character set.
I've got two principals that don't agree with this:
.com and .net are technically US domain suffixes, MANY international companies use them because .au or .de are too obscure.
1.) I don't want the U.S. to regulate ANYTHING on the internet. Whether it's something I whole heartedly support, such as Porn sites or strong encryption, or something that annoys me, such as spamming or domain squatting. The U.S. government represents the majority of Americans, who are not online, and does not represent the population of the rest of the world, many of whom are online. Even if
2. Free market capitalism. I don't need the government to protect me from spam. Because there was a market for it, spam filters were created. Plus, it's not difficult to tell when someone is trying to get you to sign up for a mailing list, so on my own common sense tells me to enter a@b.c as my email address.
The domain name problem cropped up in my own life. My father owns a restaurant called Montserrat (6th block of South Street, Philadelphia. Try the spinach burger. It's great, and I'll be able to get a bigger hard drive for my birthday.) Since Montserrat.com was taken by an insurance company in Vancouver, and my father had no intention of paying for it, he registered monserratbistro.com. If that was taken, there's also MonserratRestaurant, MontserratAmericanBistro, MonteserratOnSouth, or any other number of possibilities. If a company is big enough that it absolutely HAS to have a certain domain name, then they're already online anyhow.
The internet economy has historically regulated itself before congress had time to reguate it for us. And everything else, such as this issue, doesn't need regulation. Overall, I'd rather just keep the government from getting anymore footholds in internet regulation than are absolutely necessary (Of which I have yet to see any).
-- I don't really have anything useful to say. ~Tuts
If you look closely, Sec. 2 paragraph B subparagraph 5 would make sites such as gwbush.com and other anti-canidate or (some company)sucks.com sites open to prosecution. This might open a pathway to political censorship in content.
I don't know if this legistlation is exactly how we want to stop domain sqauting, but we do need some law to prevent it. I generally am for less regulation, but I am not anit-government.
...motors.com). Do you think anyone was in the wrong (this is prior to any fees in domain names).
Why don't some of us think about how the Internet worked at the begining of this decade. It doesn't resemble what it is now, but we can still use many of the ideals for guidence.
The idea of a domain name was to get a unique name that people could remember assigned to a network or computer. This was not an advertising tool, but the easy to remember bit should cover the rights of those who want it to be. As such microsoft should be able to get microsoft.com.
These domain names were free, a public namespace that mearly required a form to use. As long as you kept a name server attached, you were fine. If all you want to do with a domain name is point to your home machine, but you should pick something appropriate, easy to remember, and usefull for you, your friends, your future uses, etc. The future uses should not however entail selling the name. Rather than comparing this to buying and squating on property near a city, lets compare it to a more public resource like the domain name space is. What if someone paid their $5 to enter a National park, find a really nice camping spot, and park a car their, and refuse to let someone else use the spot unless they pay them, not ever intending to camp on the spot themselves. I believe the rangers would put a stop to this, so why do we tolerate it on the Internet?
I think we should send our congressman a thumbs up on this issue, the courts are usually good at dealling with good faith issues. Someone with gwbush.com, displaying information about gwbush (that is not slanderous, that would be covered under existing law), is using the name in a proper way.
Domain name squating was encouraged by initial legitimate collisions in the name space. The party sometimes ofered lots of money, and this is ok. Our current system of squaters has turned it into a trademark problem. Here is a true example of an early domain collision.
My friend registered his nick name many years ago, and was later contacted by a large auto dealership to use it. They ofered lots of money, but that was not why he registered it. He kept the name. They ended up hiring him to do their web page (uner the name
Some people have argued that charging more and then letting people willing to spend the money do whatever, but this is rediculous. This keeps the poor college student from registering a name for legitimate reasons, and doesn't stop the big bad trademark holders at all. This would only make the Internet name space even more dominated by the wealthy.
I think our current fee structure is good because it provides a way to keep the name space open. Higher fees would restrict access.
So, lets keep the name space public (as much as possible, without it being funded by other taxes). Lets make a stand against squaters, through legal means. This bill seems to be that stand.
a whois lookup says that New England Arts and Tech owns it. But yes, GW Bush does in fact own many unflattering variations of his name.
Yet classical economics has always had a rationale for speculators, and they DO add value to an economy simply by increasing the flow of information through it. They help the price system function more efficiently, and state or cultural interference with speculators will tend to make the economy less flexible, more prone to instability and unpredictability, and overall a less happy place to deal.
In reality this has very little to do with intellectual property issues, and a lot to do with continuing public misunderstanding of the very valuable role speculators play in any advanced economy. Naturally one should not expect the U.S. Congress to pay that any heed. If it appeases their contributors and throws the mob a bone, go for it.
What if it were illegal to sell a domain name for more than the going rate for unregistered ones? You could get rid of squatters (there'd be no profit in it), and therefore you could presumably get rid of all the laws that currently exist just to hurt squatters, like giving trademark holders god-like power, etc.
Am I crazy?
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
I'm always amused how when something like this comes up we spend hours upon hours trying to define it by way of an analogy. What is it about the human mind that always needs an analogy to assimilate new information or processes?
I post links to stuff here
I bet if you're their customers, you spend a lot of time saying "What 'chew talkin' about, willis?"-k
To quote from Internet Names Australia's (the .com.au domain name register) the .com.au domain has similar rules to .ca:
:-) ).
'[a business] currently registered and trading in Australia [may] register an Internet address (domain name) that is closely aligned with their commercial name.'
There is also a provision disallowing generic product names (whois.aunic.net has no listing for beer.com.au for instance
However there are several problems with this policy.
(i) Businesses cannot use registered trademarks as domain names. They get around this by registering 'shelf' business names, ie ones they're never going to use... This annoys people with interests in promoting a commercial product, but they get around it by registering a shelf name they're never going to use. Not ideal.
(ii) The above provision also causes trouble by allowing people to squat on non-generic, but recognisable names by registering a related business name. The national youth ('alternative') radio station, Triple J, has a website at http://triplej.abc.net.au, but of course, domain name guessing might lead a "young fan" to type 'http://www.jjj.com.au' (JJJ being the station ID), which is currently (and amusingly defensively) being squatted on.