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Trademark Cyberpiracy Prevention Act

Posted by jamie on from the arr-matey.com dept.

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?

13 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. ICANN? I hope not! by Aaron+M.+Renn · · Score: 3

    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.

  2. Where can I find a list of (U.S.) trademarks? by GoodPint · · Score: 3
    As the European owner of a .com domain name, could I have my domain taken off me under this law?

    Can anyone point me to an online list of US trademarks so I can check if various domains are trademarked or not?

    Thanks, GoodPint.

  3. I've got a lack of faith already... by cswiii · · Score: 4

    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?

  4. And I thought Al Gore invented it... by aziraphale · · Score: 4
    ``The term `Internet' has the meaning given that term in section 230(f)(1) of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 230(f)1)).''

    So Congress came up with the Internet in the 1930s? Why didn't they tell anyone about it?

    1. Re:And I thought Al Gore invented it... by mhatle · · Score: 3

      Uhh no. My guess is that the Communications Act of 1934 setup the US Code Title 47 section 230.

      Then a later bill amended the original Act (not the US Code) with the term internet. By amending the original Act and not the US Code, the term "Internet" has the meaning as given in a 1934 Law..

      (US Congress does that all the time, it makes it a bitch to cross reference things sometimes.. Instead of amending the code, they amend the original enacting legislation, which automatically amends the code!)

      --Mark

  5. Re:The "first arrived first served" was better... by Stonehand · · Score: 3

    Did you read the section regarding 'bad-faith intent'? The courts are to take into consideration a whole horde of factors, so this bill wouldn't suddenly render liable any but the most egregious of cases.

    If you're already running unrelated services that are relatively innocent, you're fine. If you've got a business selling dragon miniatures at "dragon.com", then it's harder for TSR, er, WoTC, to come after you simply because they own the trademark -- as a *magazine* name.

    If you're, say, running a hard-core porn site called "reddhat.com", featuring group sex clips which bizzarely happen to include a red felt hat in every frame, then RHAT is probably going to be able to nail you big-time for it. The same might happen if Nader went nuts, registered 'pinto.com', and used it to show footage of cars whose gas tanks explode because they've been conveniently rigged with small charges ala _Dateline:NBC-style_ (IIRC, it was them that did this, but my memory could be lying and it might have been ABC's _Prime Time Live_...).

    --
    Only the dead have seen the end of war.
  6. Re:Not online yet by EisPick · · Score: 3

    There is a new online database here: http://www.uspto.gov/tmdb/index.html. USPTO says there are "limitations" to it, but it's better than nothing.

    There are also 70 trademark libraries around the U.S. Here's a list: http://www.uspto.gov/web/of fices/ac/ido/ptdl/index.html.

    You'll miss out on the ambiance of Crystal City's concrete canyons, but then maybe that's a benefit.

  7. Trademark Cyberpiracy Prevention Act by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4

    the canadian (.ca) domain registation process pretty much eliminates the issue of 'domain squatting & profitering' by requireing organizations to have a registered corporation.

    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 .ca domain.

    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 .com sillyness.

    oh yeh. if you meet the requirements for a .ca (or province.ca domain, there is no charge for the registration of your domain name!

    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

  8. Internet Real Estate by Quinthar · · Score: 5

    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.

    1. Re:Internet Real Estate by MattMann · · Score: 3
      Wait a minute... you say "people suddenly don't *want* to treat it as property". But they do. It is you who suddenly doesn't want to. This different interpretation is that the people who got the trademark granted to them as property (from the US PTO and int'l treaty, etc.) think that the names are their property, and suddenly, you want to reset the game and keep DNS outside of of trademark law.

      But should DNS be outside of trademark law? Many companies have invested good money giving "meaning" to their trademarks, whether or not you like them, and they did it on the basis of a legal/regulatory promise that they owned the names, whether or not you suddenly want to ignore that either. Both as a merchant or as a consumer, it is quite reasonable to hope that trademark law should apply to domains. Let me give more examples of how ignoring the history of trademarks would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

      You call Intellectual Property "fictional". I think you mean "abstract", right? it's not a fiction that you pay fines for violating the law surrounding IP, but the property in question is an abstraction and certainly it's legitimate to consider whether it's a good idea or not, or a "moral" one, for that matter (who, after all, has the right to say I can't use whatever words I want). I'll dive in right here:

      You say, the "whole concept of squatting as somehow Bad is very silly." It's not at all! Am I being inconsistent? One minute I think names are property, the next minute I don't? To understand the consistency, you've got to understand some trademark basics. There is nobody out there except a few anarchists and nihilists who don't believe in the principles behind trademark law, and this includes you. When you buy a Coke, you want, as a purely practical matter, some assurance that you are getting a Coke and not a can of 7up. When you come to slashdot.org, you want to come to slashdot. If you are slashdot, yes, you feel even more strongly that when people type slashdot that they should get slashdot.

      Responding to this need on the part of buyers and sellers, governments all over the world have authorized merchants to "own" their names. But the law is actually tempered to respond to many of the objections that people are raising in this forum. For example, you can't get a trademark for nothing (read: squatting). You can only trademark a good or service that you are actually offering for trade under that name. (The application asks on what date did you start selling, and asks for a copy of the label. And, BTW, you lose the trademark if you stop using it. Really.) So, right here we can see that domain squatting is breaking a trademark rule, and it's a good rule. [Now, before you hit reply, I'm not saying that domains are trademarks; I am advocating that they should be.] Like so many posters are noticing, we give up some freedom when we allow ownership of names; At least let's minimize that by not giving up freedom for nothing.

      Other aspects of trademark law do not map cleanly onto domain names. which is partly why DNS is considered so broken. For example, trademark law is tempered by a whole bunch of "reasonableness" sorts of clauses based on the likelihood of confusion on the part of the consumer: geography and product category are used to maximize the number of people who can share a name, minimizing the restriction on freedom. This is why there is a trademarked Johnson outboard motor, and a floorwax, and dozens of smaller "Johnson" companies. That sort of distinction is problematic in the DNS system, (and especially moreso in the ".COM" system), but it is not necessarily solved by increasing the number of TopLevelDomains, or by deeply qualifying the hierarchy because some trademarks are trademarks in all categories. "Sony" makes lots of different sorts of products, and if you hate 'em, don't buy em, but at least you know who they are.

      There's lots more to say about trademarks, but I'll let other people talk now.

  9. Squatters in general... by Ripp · · Score: 4

    Need to be taken out back and kicked in the laurels a few times.

    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 .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.

    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.
  10. Your physical property analogy is a bit flawed by Fastolfe · · Score: 3

    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.

  11. Modify .us policy and use country code exclusively by Fastolfe · · Score: 4

    I would have no problem getting rid of generic TLD's entirely and moving everything into country codes.

    Unfortunately the .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.

    What if an additional subdomain under .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, 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..