"Picture yourself. In a boat. On a river. With Tan-gerine dreams, and MARMALADE skies! Somebody -- calls you... you anssswerrr quuuiiitee sllllowwwwllllyyyy, A GIRL! with kalEIIIIDOscope eyes..
Ugh. I'm gonna have to slaughter a pig to get that out of my head now.
"I'm glad to say I was there to see the day the US government sold out the Internet in Berlin" - Don Telage.
"The response was basically, 'I'm too busy. Go learn English."
That's about right. In the day ICANN was concentrating on trademark issues and the reasons it got to exist in the first place (new tlds, international domain names) were back benched. It's not like we didn't have laws against trademark infringment, but the trademark lobby wanted greater rights in cyberspace than it has in the real world, and it can be argued they got 'em. Yo folks would shit if you knew how much money the TM guys spent on this. It's greater than hundreds of millions. Just to prevent a few new lines of text from going into a a file called db.root on a computer in Virginia.
Keep in mind the mantra ICANN likes to chant is "stability" which in this case means "no growth".
"There's . . . a little anti-American rock-throwing in that description," said Mike Roberts, the first president and chief executive of ICANN. "The engineers thought that trying to do the non-Roman alphabet thing with all this growth would destabilize the Internet and cause crashes."
Show me an engineer than ever said this. How has the DNS changed since then? It hasn't of course. But then Mike Roberts has lied to me before.
Before they rush on with alphabets that read right to left and use alternative character sets they really should try English words with greater than 8 bit characters. Are they gonna actually work? There's still a lot of old DNS code out there *cough*BIND4*cough*.
But, if they don't work, it's not like the existing 8 bit characters names will suddenly stop working or that sparks will fly out the back of your computer.
Working models of IDN ("International Domain Names") have been shown for over a decade. Whenever some alternative to the US controlled DNS starts to get "legs" ICANN does something. In all cases it's been too little too late.
Fasten your seat belts, this is gonna be a rough ride.
Its predecessor the Atari 800 was instant on. Pop in the basic cartridge, turn the power on and ther you were. In Basic land. At least the Amiga had C.
And cool graphics.
I was shocked to find there were people (Mike Meyer, how can I remember this stuff and still not remember where I put my glasses?) that didn't give a rats ass about the grpahics but just wanted to code C on a CPU with a linear address space ("segments are for worms").
Matt Dillon (Of FreeBSD and Dargonfly BSD fame) ported Bash to the Amiga. He must have been like, 8 or something at the time.
And there was a UUCP package for it too. During a brief period there were more Amigas on the network than PCs.
"Someone should be reporting the number that are already installed and in use.
There was a car chase in LA about a week ago that left the LA city limits and was headed north on the 14 freeway (to Lancaster/Palmdale) after a liquor store robbery. The local TV station(s) covering the chase went to a commercial break and when they came back the car had mysteriously stopped on the freeway and the occupants were on the ground being handcuffed.
The news chopper pilot just commented that the driver had stopped the car on the freeway for no apparent reason. Even after the chase was over, none of the stations aired footage of the car actually stopping."
Yes Craigslist is partly owned by ebay. Not because Craig wanted it that way. A former partner sold his shares (30% of the company) to ebay and Craig wasn't happy about this, but still retains a majority of them. He doesn't want to become the next big thing and he and the CL community like it the way it is. Sorry that's it's not the nanny state you want or expect, but ya know, caveat emptor and all. Just take reasonable precautions. It's really for local items that you pick up and can see, touch and play with before you buy.
I can't say I use CL a lot but I've had tremendous luck with it. And XBR for $20, $1000 worth of exotic tires, damn near new for $100. I can't complain.
I use ebay very very occasionally these days. Maybe a cable here and there when I can get one for a couple of bucks instead of paying $39.95 in the local office stores (which aren't actually real local, I live in a fairly remote rural area).
"People might find the views of a Canadian IP Lawyer interesting. He seems to think that the copyright claim is non-sense, and the official mark one likely won't fly based on recent Supreme court rulings"
I dunno, this IP lawer makes little sense to me. First he's going on about Copyright, God knows why. Second, the supreme court ruling he's talking about is about using trademark to extend patent duration, third he states an official mark has soektimes more or less punch than a trademark; I'm still trying to find where it has less, and can't.
He makes less sense than your average slashdotter IMO.
It all depends on the judge. Official Mark case law is not well estrablished or predictable from what I've read. We'll have to see.
Pro: don't but fucking stupid, it's a blowup of a penny. Dismiss. Con: it's the govt's image, who have absolute control, and we don't mind it being used anywhere but here. It's infringing because we say it is. Period. Request summary judgement under 9(1)(n)(iii) of the Trade-marks Act. Thank you m'lord.
Verisign didn't exist then and Netsol hadn't got the Internic contract yet. The SRI-Nic was keeping track of stuff (albeit badly). Nato was created after the other 7.
"So what if there are thousands of top level domain names? I don't care personally - so is there a technical issue?"
No.
Karl Denninger and Paul Vixie looked at this in the 80s. There can be a million tlds and it won't make any impace. Keep in mind in the day they were worried about a million names in.com and there are about 40 million names now.
Actually ICANN approved (afer several iterations) the.xxx proposal and sent it up to its overlord, the US Department of Commerce for rubber stamping to include it in the (legacy) root zone. Keep in mind the GAC ("Government Advisory Committee") of ICANN hadn't said anything about it and they have de facto veto rights to the spineless entity that is ICANN.
But, a newly Bush appointed director of the commerce department got a phone call.
Turns out Karl Rove had got a letter from a large (read "powerful") southern religous organization with three demands: 1) no gay marriage 2) no stem cell resrarch 3) no.xxx.
Rove picked up the phone to them and said "I think I can help you with that third one", called commerce and nixed the.xxx tld. America then denouced the tld, Australia followed suit (a ex government wonk from Aus., Paul Twomey was instrumental in getting ICANN started and was an ICANN CEO for a while) and, presumably as favours were called in, other world governments expressed displeasure with.xxx. It is now dead, Jim.
Theory: ICANN has a narrow mandate of technical administration of names and numbers on the internet by measuring and implementeing "community consensus". That's what's on paper.
Reality: it's all trademark lawyers, registrars and government officials; they do as they please.
That whiting sound you hear is Jon Postel spinning in his grave at 15,000 RPM. This is exactly the thing he worled so hard to prevent before he died suddenly durng the formation of ICANN.
Chris is being punished by ICANN for working withing the alternative root system. He'll either never or will be the last to get.web into the root. Interestingly Darth Cerf refused to give.web to anybody else at the (lame) Marina Del Rey ICANN meeting in 2000 because he knew.web has already been deployed (and that Chris would sue him) despite giving.biz to somebody else when it had been deployed for 4-5 years already.
From the archives:
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 1995 12:40:30 -0700 From: Jon Postel To: rick@uunet.uu.net Subject: Re: ISOC Statement on Domain Name Fees
Rick:
I think this introduction of charging by the Intenic for domain registrations is sufficient cause to take steps to set up a small number of alternate top level domains managed by other registration centers.
I'd like to see some competition between registration services to encourage good service at low prices.
I do think we need to proceed with some care, to understand what are the requirements and responsibilities of these service centers, what informatrion they have to provide to the community, what oversight they are subject to and by whom, etc.
I'd be happy if you could help me come up with a plan for this.
--jon
--
From: Simon Higgs
Cerf: Alternate roots are "cyber-squatting at the top level."
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/icann/stockholm/archive/scribe-bod-060401.html
Chris & I were in the IANA conference room (next to Postel's office). Bill Manning said "go set up your registries or we won't be able to give your application full consideration".
And as long as I'm here I can't resist throwing these up:
From: Einar Stefferud
Sometimes the resilience of the Internet to stupidity truly astounds me.
--
Andy Mueller-Maguhn, one of five at-large board members elected late last year, abstained from a vote to approve the minutes of the previous meeting, explaining he had not read any such minutes.
"Fifteen minutes later it was discovered that there were no minutes," Muller-Maguhn said. "But that is the mentality on the ICANN board: Always to say yes. It's a lot like in the old East Germany."
.nato was the first 4 letter tld. It was added when a general called IANA and insisted it be put in back in the 80s. It was removed by Postel as cruft around 96 or 97 when somebody pointed out it was still in the root zone file.
Point of trivia: ".dot" was the very first alternative TLD, it came up on the usenet II (nee BOFH) newsgroup mailing list. I pointed slash.dot to slashdot for ages but nobody ever used it. This was about 10 years ago
"So governments can claim copyrights, trademarks, and get patents?" "
Not relevant. This is a "official mark". Which is like a trademark but has (greatly) enhanced powers. Only for use by govt or govt regulated organizations for "the benefit of the public".
Nonsense. They just have more of an accent. If you've never been outside Canada you never notice this, but if you've lived in, say, the US for a while you notice "out" and "about" and commonly pronounced as "ooot" and "aboot" even yrar later but nearly all Canadians, albeit sometimes only slightly. But it's there.
"Anyway this is about the Canadian Mint claiming copyright on the word "Cent" "
Where did you see the word copyright anywhere in any claim.
It's an "official mark" which is comes under trademark law, and they're not the same as trademarks.
Interestingly, the National Post site is at canada.com which if the govt wanted to could get WIPO to take it away from them as so far they have always ceded official mark domains back to the government.
Remember, it doesn't have to be fair, it just has to be legal.
You need to look up "official mark". Although handled through the trademark office an official mark has enhanced protection unter the law. Official marks can be granted for things you can't get a trademark for and the exact wording does not need to be registered. And this is a trademark issue that has nothing to do with copyright. The right to copy money falled under the criminal code. A case could be made for protection as an registered industrial design though.
Having said that, according to the (govt) strategis database there are 123 hits for trademarks with "cent" in them.
The questions are: is the likeness of the penny similar enough to warrent infringement. Courts so far seem to want things to be very very close. They could lose on that point. Is "one cent" protected? If it is it hasn't been enforced in the past, not that this matters a whole lot as far as an official mark is concerned.
This case could go either way. And they might or might not be reversed by a higher court. There is no federal court ruling on this and lower course have been inconsistant. It's a distractive strategy IMO to piss off the Toronto poeple.
"And if you don't defend your trademark you lose it"
True. And this is not the first time the Canadian penny has been used like this. So in theory the Mints trademark for, um, their brand of penny is already lost.
Trademarks exist to protect consumers from confusion as to the source of goods or a service in a specific class of goods or service in a specific geographic area.
Now, it's not like there's any consumer confusion with the Canadian penny. In fact there are federal laws that make sure there's no other source of the penny. There are laws the prevent you from using life size likenesses of money but that's no the case here, it's really meant to prevent ounterfitting of bills, but this is from pre-security measures on bills such as the gold foil stripes on the notes which cannot be printed.
As for the idea they can trademark "one cent" as their brand of money, that's just rediculous, it's a generic term and cannot be trademarked.
BUT! There's a special subsection in Canadian trademark law ("9(1)(n)(iii)") that deals with "official marks" which have enhanced protection, to be used by the Royalty, Universities, Canadian government etc to protect things like official government marks such as seals and coats of arms.
Case law is muddy here, until federal court hands down some decisions this could go either way. I can see them retaining the right to the penny graphic (and I can see it being rejected because the graphic in the poster is not similar enough - it's too big) but the text "one cent" - I cannot imagine any competant court finding the government having exclusive rights to that phrase.
This is just a pissing contest between to parts of government and is an utter time waster. If it gets to court it'll be interesting.
I think somebody ought to warn the March of Dimes poeple though...
Slashdot Mirror
" Picture yourself. In a boat. On a river.
With Tan-gerine dreams, and MARMALADE skies!
Somebody -- calls you... you anssswerrr quuuiiitee sllllowwwwllllyyyy,
A GIRL! with kalEIIIIDOscope eyes..
Ugh. I'm gonna have to slaughter a pig to get that out of my head now.
Whosever brings up Spocks "record" dies.
"I mean, hello - does your desktop explode whenever it encounters an error? "
Not since I switched to Opera.
"But the RFC says..."
Welcome to reality. If you made a mail daemon that worked according to spec nobody would be able to use it.
If you saw the errors in SSL browsers ignoered just to they look like they're working you'd shit.
"I mean... how exactly does a straightforward post questioning the ethics of murder get moderated as +5 Funny?"
Cause it only goes up to 5.
""ebaý.com" or "banköfamerica.com""
Browser writers might want to consider shipping with 8 bit character domain names as the default for a start.
"I'm glad to say I was there to see the day the US government sold out the Internet in Berlin" - Don Telage.
"The response was basically, 'I'm too busy. Go learn English."
That's about right. In the day ICANN was concentrating on trademark issues and the reasons it got to exist in the first place (new tlds, international domain names) were back benched. It's not like we didn't have laws against trademark infringment, but the trademark lobby wanted greater rights in cyberspace than it has in the real world, and it can be argued they got 'em. Yo folks would shit if you knew how much money the TM guys spent on this. It's greater than hundreds of millions. Just to prevent a few new lines of text from going into a a file called db.root on a computer in Virginia.
Keep in mind the mantra ICANN likes to chant is "stability" which in this case means "no growth".
"There's . . . a little anti-American rock-throwing in that description," said Mike Roberts, the first president and chief executive of ICANN. "The engineers thought that trying to do the non-Roman alphabet thing with all this growth would destabilize the Internet and cause crashes."
Show me an engineer than ever said this. How has the DNS changed since then? It hasn't of course. But then Mike Roberts has lied to me before.
Before they rush on with alphabets that read right to left and use alternative character sets they really should try English words with greater than 8 bit characters. Are they gonna actually work? There's still a lot of old DNS code out there *cough*BIND4*cough*.
But, if they don't work, it's not like the existing 8 bit characters names will suddenly stop working or that sparks will fly out the back of your computer.
Working models of IDN ("International Domain Names") have been shown for over a decade. Whenever some alternative to the US controlled DNS starts to get "legs" ICANN does something. In all cases it's been too little too late.
Fasten your seat belts, this is gonna be a rough ride.
Correct.
Its predecessor the Atari 800 was instant on. Pop in the basic cartridge, turn the power on and ther you were. In Basic land. At least the Amiga had C.
And cool graphics.
I was shocked to find there were people (Mike Meyer, how can I remember this stuff and still not remember where I put my glasses?) that didn't give a rats ass about the grpahics but just wanted to code C on a CPU with a linear address space ("segments are for worms").
Matt Dillon (Of FreeBSD and Dargonfly BSD fame) ported Bash to the Amiga. He must have been like, 8 or something at the time.
And there was a UUCP package for it too. During a brief period there were more Amigas on the network than PCs.
Google "slaves".
Sometimes you get an ebay ad for them.
This raised a bit of a fuss a while back and they quickly canned it, but ever now and again it comes back. The last time was a few months ago.
Simon Higgs reports:
"Someone should be reporting the number that are already installed and in
use.
There was a car chase in LA about a week ago that left the LA city
limits and was headed north on the 14 freeway (to Lancaster/Palmdale)
after a liquor store robbery. The local TV station(s) covering the chase
went to a commercial break and when they came back the car had
mysteriously stopped on the freeway and the occupants were on the ground
being handcuffed.
The news chopper pilot just commented that the driver had stopped the
car on the freeway for no apparent reason. Even after the chase was
over, none of the stations aired footage of the car actually stopping."
Yes Craigslist is partly owned by ebay. Not because Craig wanted it that way. A former partner sold his shares (30% of the company) to ebay and Craig wasn't happy about this, but still retains a majority of them. He doesn't want to become the next big thing and he and the CL community like it the way it is. Sorry that's it's not the nanny state you want or expect, but ya know, caveat emptor and all. Just take reasonable precautions. It's really for local items that you pick up and can see, touch and play with before you buy.
I can't say I use CL a lot but I've had tremendous luck with it. And XBR for $20, $1000 worth of exotic tires, damn near new for $100. I can't complain.
I use ebay very very occasionally these days. Maybe a cable here and there when I can get one for a couple of bucks instead of paying $39.95 in the local office stores (which aren't actually real local, I live in a fairly remote rural area).
"People might find the views of a Canadian IP Lawyer interesting. He seems to think that the copyright claim is non-sense, and the official mark one likely won't fly based on recent Supreme court rulings"
I dunno, this IP lawer makes little sense to me. First he's going on about Copyright, God knows why. Second, the supreme court ruling he's talking about is about using trademark to extend patent duration, third he states an official mark has soektimes more or less punch than a trademark; I'm still trying to find where it has less, and can't.
He makes less sense than your average slashdotter IMO.
It all depends on the judge. Official Mark case law is not well estrablished or predictable from what I've read. We'll have to see.
Pro: don't but fucking stupid, it's a blowup of a penny. Dismiss.
Con: it's the govt's image, who have absolute control, and we don't mind it being used anywhere but here. It's infringing because we say it is. Period. Request summary judgement under 9(1)(n)(iii) of the Trade-marks Act. Thank you m'lord.
Verisign didn't exist then and Netsol hadn't got the Internic contract yet. The SRI-Nic was keeping track of stuff (albeit badly). Nato was created after the other 7.
"No! "
You mean "no, Network Solutions should retain its de facto monopoly as a registry" I presume?
"So what if there are thousands of top level domain names? I don't care personally - so is there a technical issue?"
.com and there are about 40 million names now.
No.
Karl Denninger and Paul Vixie looked at this in the 80s. There can be a million tlds and it won't make any impace. Keep in mind in the day they were worried about a million names in
Actually ICANN approved (afer several iterations) the .xxx proposal and sent it up to its overlord, the US Department of Commerce for rubber stamping to include it in the (legacy) root zone. Keep in mind the GAC ("Government Advisory Committee") of ICANN hadn't said anything about it and they have de facto veto rights to the spineless entity that is ICANN.
.xxx.
.xxx tld. America then denouced the tld, Australia followed suit (a ex government wonk from Aus., Paul Twomey was instrumental in getting ICANN started and was an ICANN CEO for a while) and, presumably as favours were called in, other world governments expressed displeasure with .xxx. It is now dead, Jim.
But, a newly Bush appointed director of the commerce department got a phone call.
Turns out Karl Rove had got a letter from a large (read "powerful") southern religous organization with three demands: 1) no gay marriage 2) no stem cell resrarch 3) no
Rove picked up the phone to them and said "I think I can help you with that third one", called commerce and nixed the
Theory: ICANN has a narrow mandate of technical administration of names and numbers on the internet by measuring and implementeing "community consensus". That's what's on paper.
Reality: it's all trademark lawyers, registrars and government officials; they do as they please.
That whiting sound you hear is Jon Postel spinning in his grave at 15,000 RPM. This is exactly the thing he worled so hard to prevent before he died suddenly durng the formation of ICANN.
From the archives: And as long as I'm here I can't resist throwing these up:
.nato was the first 4 letter tld. It was added when a general called IANA and insisted it be put in back in the 80s. It was removed by Postel as cruft around 96 or 97 when somebody pointed out it was still in the root zone file.
Let's not forget ".museum" which led to such important names as "swiss.frog.museum" sadly now taken down, but archive.org remembers: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://swiss.frog.museum
No, but (with google at least) you can restrct searchs to a domain and all domains are treated equally.
.asia tld.
So, "foo site:asia" as a google search term would find occurences of "foo" in sites with a
(This is handy and fun when you look at "site:gov" stuff)
Point of trivia: ".dot" was the very first alternative TLD, it came up on the usenet II (nee BOFH) newsgroup mailing list. I pointed slash.dot to slashdot for ages but nobody ever used it. This was about 10 years ago
"So governments can claim copyrights, trademarks, and get patents?" "
Not relevant. This is a "official mark". Which is like a trademark but has (greatly) enhanced powers. Only for use by govt or govt regulated organizations for "the benefit of the public".
" so if I take a photo of a Nike swoosh and then stick that on some shoes is that ok cos I 'made my own pictures of the swoosh'? "
Another mitigating factor here is that in the US products made with slave, forced or child labour are not protected by trademark.
" You know, only maritimers actually say "aboot" "
Nonsense. They just have more of an accent. If you've never been outside Canada you never notice this, but if you've lived in, say, the US for a while you notice "out" and "about" and commonly pronounced as "ooot" and "aboot" even yrar later but nearly all Canadians, albeit sometimes only slightly. But it's there.
"Anyway this is about the Canadian Mint claiming copyright on the word "Cent" "
Where did you see the word copyright anywhere in any claim.
It's an "official mark" which is comes under trademark law, and they're not the same as trademarks.
Interestingly, the National Post site is at canada.com which if the govt wanted to could get WIPO to take it away from them as so far they have always ceded official mark domains back to the government.
Remember, it doesn't have to be fair, it just has to be legal.
(This applies to Canada)
You need to look up "official mark". Although handled through the trademark office an official mark has enhanced protection unter the law. Official marks can be granted for things you can't get a trademark for and the exact wording does not need to be registered. And this is a trademark issue that has nothing to do with copyright. The right to copy money falled under the criminal code. A case could be made for protection as an registered industrial design though.
Having said that, according to the (govt) strategis database there are 123 hits for trademarks with "cent" in them.
The questions are: is the likeness of the penny similar enough to warrent infringement. Courts so far seem to want things to be very very close. They could lose on that point. Is "one cent" protected? If it is it hasn't been enforced in the past, not that this matters a whole lot as far as an official mark is concerned.
See
1) http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/app/cipo/trademarks/search/tmSearch.do?language=eng
2) 9(1)(n)(iii) of the Trade-marks Act
This case could go either way. And they might or might not be reversed by a higher court. There is no federal court ruling on this and lower course have been inconsistant. It's a distractive strategy IMO to piss off the Toronto poeple.
"And if you don't defend your trademark you lose it"
True. And this is not the first time the Canadian penny has been used like this. So in theory the Mints trademark for, um, their brand of penny is already lost.
Trademarks exist to protect consumers from confusion as to the source of goods or a service in a specific class of goods or service in a specific geographic area.
Now, it's not like there's any consumer confusion with the Canadian penny. In fact there are federal laws that make sure there's no other source of the penny. There are laws the prevent you from using life size likenesses of money but that's no the case here, it's really meant to prevent ounterfitting of bills, but this is from pre-security measures on bills such as the gold foil stripes on the notes which cannot be printed.
As for the idea they can trademark "one cent" as their brand of money, that's just rediculous, it's a generic term and cannot be trademarked.
BUT! There's a special subsection in Canadian trademark law ("9(1)(n)(iii)") that deals with "official marks" which have enhanced protection, to be used by the Royalty, Universities, Canadian government etc to protect things like official government marks such as seals and coats of arms.
Case law is muddy here, until federal court hands down some decisions this could go either way. I can see them retaining the right to the penny graphic (and I can see it being rejected because the graphic in the poster is not similar enough - it's too big) but the text "one cent" - I cannot imagine any competant court finding the government having exclusive rights to that phrase.
This is just a pissing contest between to parts of government and is an utter time waster. If it gets to court it'll be interesting.
I think somebody ought to warn the March of Dimes poeple though...