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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?
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.