Re: the Cybersquatting bill

["Lindsey Smith" <gruenebanane@hotmail.com>]

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I subscribed to this listserve specifically because I am an activist who is 
completely ignorant of most computer related stuff.  Could someone please 
explain what Cybersquatting means?  Sorry, I know its a stupid question on a 
list such as this.
Thanks,
Lindsey


----Original Message Follows----
From: ZoeScanner <zoescanner@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: hacktivism@tao.ca
To: hacktivism@tao.ca
Subject: the Cybersquatting bill
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 00:49:21 -0800 (PST)

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Reply-To: CNET For What It's Worth
<clientservices@flo-delivery.com>
To: zoescanner@yahoo.com
Subject: FWIW: The Next Big Headache for Builders
Date: Tue,  2 Nov 1999 14:33:01 +0000 (GMT)
Status:  U
X-UIDL: 941567646.11101.mail1
********************Dan says************************
DAN SHAFER | FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH
Random thoughts from the mind of CNET Builder.com's
Master
Builder
November 2, 1999
No. 24


2. U.S. Congress Tries to Squash Cybersquatters

There goes the poor, pitiful, misguided U.S. Congress
again.
Thinking it can control any aspect of the Web with
pieces of
paper and threats of legal action. In their monumental
ignorance -- and the arrogance that so often
accompanies
naivete -- these people really believe they can have a
significant impact on something that so transcends
their
very existence that it simply rolls over them like a
tidal
wave over a sand dollar. Under new legislation rolling
out
of the ringingly hollow halls of Washington in late
October,
cybersquatting is now illegal in the United States.
Pardon
me while I yawn up my sleeve.

This legislation, which the Clinton administration may
well
veto anyway (thereby saving some shred of what little
remains of America's reputation for being savvy in
such
matters), bans the registration of or trafficking in
Internet domain names that are identical to company
trademarks or sufficiently similar to those trademarks
to
confuse the public.

Viewed one way, this is a blatant attempt by a
legislative
body to close the barn door after the horse has
escaped and
to punish the horse for escaping. There are no doubt
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of entrepreneurial-minded
individuals out there who have registered domain names
of
existing companies solely in the hope of selling those
domain names when the slumbering behemoths who own the
trademarks wake up and suddenly discover there is a
World
Wide Web. Punishing the quick-thinking entrepreneur
who
stays on top of such things and rewarding the
foot-dragging
corporations who still have task forces studying
whether the
company ought to allow access to three fields of its
personnel database by the company's own personnel
seems like
a strange way for a free-market society to behave.

Viewed another way, this is a blatant attempt by a
legislative body to curry favory with corporate
interests
(who, after all, pay the bills of government on so
many
levels that it's hardly surprising that they can
control
much of its activity) who, having been caught with
their
pants around their virtual ankles, are now scrambling
to
catch up in a space dominated by small upstart
startups.

However you view it -- and whether you agree with the
sentiment behind it -- this is seriously misguided
legislation for a number of reasons:

** The courts have been dealing quite nicely and
intelligently with the issue of domain vs
trademark/copyright infringement without any outside
interference, thank you very much. Deciding these
things on
a case-by-case basis, at least until some meaningful
patterns emerge, seems far wiser than allowing a
legislative
body to attempt to draft inclusive language that will
deal
with the nuances of the issue.

** As Clinton administration officials have said, this
kind
of legislation will likely be viewed by other
countries as a
gauntlet thrown in defiance of the global nature of
the
problem. It could prompt other nations to adopt their
own
legislation on the subject, resulting in mass
confusion for
the multinationals who stand to benefit most from the
legislation if it's signed into law.

** The question of whether a domain name is
sufficiently
similar to an established trademark to cause consumer
confusion is sufficiently problematic that it occupies
large
percentages of US court docket time in intellectual
property
cases. There have been numerous egregious examples of
small
business owners being forced to close or change their
names
because of this "dangerous confusion." On the Web, the
issue
is even muddier: does a trademark confusion exist if
the Web
site is selling something other than the product the
trademark owner is selling? Or is that another kind of
illegal act?

** Enforcement will be a joke. Why? The US can't even
get
its act together around the relatively simpler (but
not
simple) problem of domain name issuance and tracking.
The
ICANN initiative has been bogged down for months. If
we
can't figure out how issue and track domain names, how
in
the world are we going to deal with intellectual
property
issues surrounding them?

Congress needs a crash course in Internet technology
followed by a swift kick in the place it sits. I hope
Clinton vetos this misguided piece of legislation,
sending
it to a richly deserved pre-launch death.

********************ZoeScanner writes*****************

My thoughts on this....were once that we should all
gather for another united attack...but...after
considering they probably will be expecting that ,
perhaps it would be best to throw out pages every
where we could in well worded ,artfully
presented,links included,protest of this insane
censoring ,....????


=====

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