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Yahoo Fails To Obtain YAHU.CON and YAHU.COM.CN:
Pacific Epoch: Yahoo lost an appeal to obtain the names YAHU.COM and YAHU.COM.CN in China. The article states that the current registrant's name has the same pinyin, or phonetic rendering in roman characters, but uses different Chinese characters.
Finally, someone who is not a "shill" for the ISPs or for those insane free speech weirdos with something interesting to say about Net neutrality. Gaige is a cool guy so you really oughta read this :-).
Gaige's Pages - Network neutrality is about control:
Whereas the rhetoric is certainly intended to incite and not to inform (I don't believe that either side of any argument uses a slogan to inform, by the way), it isn't just empty fluff. In particular, as you noted earlier in the piece, the costs for services will eventually be borne by the customers regardless of who they pay for them and how they're provided. The purpose of the net neutrality folks is to put the control of paying for service in the hands of the consumers, where a customer who wants to use any number of services that consume large amounts of bandwidth pays for a higher quality, higher bandwidth, and probably higher-priced connection. This does two things: first, it makes the payments transparent, since the users know they are using bandwidth to watch television or movies, or other things that either take a long time or involve a high level of interactivity; second, it provides an avenue for innovative, high bandwidth services to get a start in the world.
Conflict of Opinion:
If a UDRP panelist believes domainers are the same thing as cybersquatters, is he fit to arbitrate? I came across an editorial on CNET today by Doug Isenberg, an attorney in Atlanta and founder of GigaLaw.com, and a domain name panelist for the World Intellectual Property Organization. The guest editorial focuses on Whois privacy and why it's imperative to maintain open access to registrant data for intellectual property and legal purposes. That's a common opinion I've read a million times. Nothing groundbreaking there. But then I was shocked to read that Isenberg generalizes domainers as cybersquatters: "Today, cybersquatters have rebranded themselves as 'domainers.' Popular blogs and news sites track their activities..." more...
Painting With Too Broad a Brush:
Gigalaw's Doug Isenberg, in a CNet Op-Ed: "Today, cybersquatters have rebranded themselves as 'domainers.'..." I don't know if that's true, but the converse is certainly not true. The vast majority of "domainers" are not running afoul of the law, and the Isenberg piece does a significant injustice
to bulk registrants everywhere by painting them as "cybersquatters" and
denigrating the conferences and communities that support their
legitimate and lawful interests in domain name catalogs.
Add: From Domain Name Wire, which notes that Isenberg is a WIPO UDRP panelist: "I’d hate to have a UDRP decision fall into his hands if he goes in with this bias...."
Double Add: Isenberg also decries Internet "'monetization' services--which quickly let domain name registrants
turn otherwise unused, or parked, Web pages into money via affiliate
links that often trade on the goodwill established by well-known brand
owners--are finding a large and growing customer base of hungry and
often shrewd domain name registrants." Isenberg might want to talk to Vint Cerf about
this. His company runs a little service called "Google Ads," which is
probably the most popular and effective "monetization" service used by
"domainers."
How long until John Berryhill weighs in?
Macabre Result Avoided in Mortician Domain Name Case:
If a court won't let you use your own name, you might feel like you're a mere ghost of your former self. That happened to Ed Kalis of Broward County, Florida. In a recent case, Florida's court of appeal considered whether a trial court's order against Kalis, enjoining him from using his own last name in various means of advertising and in the URL for his company's website, was proper. The appellate court held that the injunction was overkill. more...
My Submission to the House Small Business Committee's Hearing On ICANN:
Here's a pointer to my statement (pdf, 7 pages) to the House Small Business Committee for tomorrow's hearing on ICANN.
It amazes how people who ought to know better fall for Verisign's siren song about its vaunted infrastructure. In reality what Verisign has assembled is a suite of relatively easily replicable DNS servers backed by a transaction system that is tiny in comparison to that of many banks. The cost to replace Verisign's registry system and its suite of name servers for .com is really only a tiny percentage of the revenue stream that ICANN has gifted unto Verisign via it's $7 per name per year registry fee.
Dotster Sued For Cybersquatting:
From Declan McCullagh, writing for CNet: "A new federal lawsuit charges that Dotster, one of the largest domain name registrars, has unlawfully participated in a massive cybersquatting campaign targeting companies such as Cingular Wireless, Disney, Ikea, Google, Neiman Marcus, Playboy and Verizon."
Copyright office jacks up the price of rescuing orphan works:
Cory Doctorow:
John Mark sez, "Folks who value creative content rescued from obscurity may be concerned about major fee increases proposed by the US Copyright Office. At the end of this month, they plan to double the fee for copyright records searching from $75 to $150 per hour (it was $20/hr as recently as 1999), and add a new $100 fee just to give frugal searchers an estimate of how much a real search is likely to cost!"
(Thanks, John Mark!)
Captain Copyright: Wikipedia pirate!:
Cory Doctorow:
Jim sez, "Captain Copyright includes two quotes about ISBN's from Wikipedia, but fails to follow the requirements of Wikipedia's GNU license by providing a direct link back to the source article or even acknowledging the GNU license as required by Wikipedia."
Captain Copyright is the propaganda cartoon character created by Canada's Access Copyright agency to "educate kids about copyright, in the most biased, one-sided and intellectually dishonest way imaginable.
(Thanks, Jim!)
Update: Allison sez, "I found one of the suggested Captain Copyright activities for grades 6-8 quite interesting. Activity 2: Does It Break the Law?, the stated purpose of which is 'To identify actions that infringe copyright,' suggests getting students to 'use a dictionary to define the word infringement. Ask students to share their definitions.' Hopefully, they're not going to be using Merriam-Webster online, which states 'No part of the work embodied in Merriam-Webster's pages on the World Wide Web and covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the written permission of the publisher.'"
Morgan Stanley takes domain name from cat | The Register:
A cat has lost its bid to retain a controversial domain name after a multinational investment bank took it to the National Arbitration Forum.
Baroness Penelope Cat of Nash DCB, who is listed as the owner of mymorganstanleyplatinum.com and was given some assistance in the case by Michael Woods, lost control of the domain to Morgan Stanley.
A key part of the case rested on whether or not Baroness Penelope was truly the owner of the domain. The first indication that the decision was unlikely to veer cat-wards came in the written decision of Arbitration Forum Panellist Richard Hill.
"Respondent maintains that it is a cat, that is, a well-known carnivorous quadruped which has long been domesticated," summarised Hill. "However, it is equally well-known that the common cat, whose scientific name is Felis domesticus, cannot speak or read or write."
Baroness Penelope argued in its submission that "the registration information is not false; there are an immense number of Domain Names registered by non human beings".
Hill was not to be swayed, however. "A common cat could not have submitted the Response (or even have registered the disputed domain name)," he wrote. "Therefore, either Respondent is a different species of cat, such as the one that stars in the motion picture 'Cat From Outer Space,' or Respondent's assertion regarding its being a cat is incorrect."
"If Respondent is in fact a cat from outer space, then it should have so indicated in its reply, in order to avoid unnecessary perplexity by the Panel."
In order to retain the domain name, Baroness Penelope had to fulfill three criteria. Having failed the first two, the case rested on whether or not having a cat as a registered owner of a domain constituted "bad faith". Hill ruled that it did.
Baroness Penelope was uncontactable for comment at the time of going to press.
See: the ruling