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