26 Mar, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 42nd comment:
I was talking about legal jurisdiction, not effective jurisdiction. We are, after all, discussing policy, or at least trying to.
Counterfeiting is a very specific concept. I am not sure that registering an expired domain can possibly be correctly conceived of as counterfeiting: if a domain expires, and somebody else legally registers it, that's pretty much all there is to it. It would be like Coca-Cola abandoning their trademark: it would become fair game for anybody to call anything Coca-Cola.
Counterfeiting is a very specific concept. I am not sure that registering an expired domain can possibly be correctly conceived of as counterfeiting: if a domain expires, and somebody else legally registers it, that's pretty much all there is to it. It would be like Coca-Cola abandoning their trademark: it would become fair game for anybody to call anything Coca-Cola.
26 Mar, 2008, Guest wrote in the 43rd comment:
Again, I'm not talking about registering an expired domain. I'm talking about registering an alternate suffix, knowingly capitalizing on someone else's good name, in order to make yourself some money from the fraudulent behavior. Maybe there's a better term for it, but in the end it's evil just the same.
26 Mar, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 44th comment:
But if there's no trademark, what claim do you have to it other than "well, I have the other one"? If you only register one, and don't buy the other, why do you own it any more than the guy down the street? What policy would you put in place to regulate this kind of behavior?
26 Mar, 2008, drrck wrote in the 45th comment:
Samson said:
Again, I'm not talking about registering an expired domain. I'm talking about registering an alternate suffix, knowingly capitalizing on someone else's good name, in order to make yourself some money from the fraudulent behavior. Maybe there's a better term for it, but in the end it's evil just the same.
Yes, but a necessary evil, though. The alternatives are much, much more evil in a broader respect.
26 Mar, 2008, kiasyn wrote in the 46th comment:
solution: discounts when buying .com, .org, .net etc as bundled package.
26 Mar, 2008, Asylumius wrote in the 47th comment:
kiasyn said:
solution: discounts when buying .com, .org, .net etc as bundled package.
Fair enough. The big guys like Godaddy even do this sometimes, but I know some of us avoid them for various reasons.
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It's quite clear who has effective jurisdiction over them. The US companies running the registries themselves. So the top-level domains are in effect US held and US run. This is unlikely to change as these organizations are big and powerful and have lots of lobbying dollars to spend to keep things where they are.
It's one definition of squatting. The other is interchangeable with spamming. Or counterfeiting if you'd prefer a stronger legal definition of the intent behind it. The end result in all cases is the same. People with ill intent have an asset that leads people away from your legitimate site to something else that could be damaging to your reputation, in the worst cases.