Hrmm let's see.. am I petty enough today...
Please avoid GoDaddy.
GoDaddy has been involved in many controversies since its foundation in 1997.
I prefer NameCheap, but almost anyone is better than GoDaddy.
*Edit: broken link
Holy $+(+$ even a registrar can't stay out of trouble
Thanks for the education
I always love these shitty “replace the enter key on a keyboard” news thumbnails. Like, ah shit, accidentally hit the “Domain Name Registration” button on my keyboard.
Oh, that's no biggie:
But where will we find young sheep passing under a bar videos?
Another great example of this being an economic rent problem.
Namecoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies, but never caught on because it's >99% domain name squatters. There's no mechanism to increase the cost of renewal to anything proportional to the value of the name, so they always renew for practically free. Consequently there's no incentive for web browsers to support it.
A domain name is like a plot of land. Right now our choices are crony capitalist ICANN with eminent domain, anarcho-capitalist crypto DNS, or sailing the high seas on an .onion address.
Hey hey hey, there’s i2p too.
zombo.com still good though
You can do anything...
Squatters do this shit every day to regular people and small businesses, but they don't have the money to convince a judge to hand over a domain.
A squatter is why Valve used steampowered.com instead of steam.com. The owner of steam.com (who has owned the domain since the early 90s!) has consistently refused to sell to anyone, and has never stated a specific reason why.
I see nothing wrong with that. It predates steam and they aren't attempting to extort large sums of money from anyone.
Hey it's just fair, and the judge has a new sports car suddenly and or a yacht.
I was more talking about the costs of the legal process itself. Justice is expensive, not everyone can afford it.
What the judge should have done is threaten to cut the domain name in half and see who was willing to give up their claim out of motherly love.
Wasn’t expecting to see biblical wisdom on the fediverse today
That's kinda how cybersquatting laws work.
Someone registered an available domain hours after I searched for it when I received our trademark. The domain was immediately put up for sale. I spent almost a year getting my ducks in a row to sue and reclaim the domain (I even had screenshots of the availability. The scammer was watching registration queries) but they let the domain expire for lack of interest. I scooped it up after that.
Legit question: why didn't you take the domain before trademark was issued?
If you already had the name registered (but not issued), couldn't you essentially cybersquat yourself and then buy it from yourself after it's been issued?
We had no intention of making/hosting a website with the trademark. The company was in agreement.
After we got it, the bossman comes to me and says "so we can make this email addresses now, right?"
Like, duuude... It's not his expertise, I know, but he thought web pages and email was totally separate systems.
Anyway, that was almost 25 years ago. All water under the bridge.
Sounds like you fucked up, tbh, you should've bought the domain even if not intending to use it, just for brand safety
That's why Research in Motion (the developer of the Blackberry) had to buy the domain "rim.jobs" when the .jobs tld was launched.
Ha, I had no idea!
I couldn't agree more.
I spent almost a year getting my ducks in a row to sue and reclaim the domain
The cost in time and resources for all of that, vs just registering the domain in the first place. 🙄
We burned a lot of midnight oil on that company. It was a early data analytics type venture that was fun, but had a lot of long nights. We had an ethical spin from the ground up which, in hindsight, is not really the direction the Internet wanted to take.
It was a great bunch of folks though. We keep in touch now and then.
Haha! Yeah we sure did.
It was a small startup in, gosh, 1999-2000 when the net was a new frontier. Lessons were learned. It's since been acquired and folded into other businesses. The domain is still in my name with a very basic static page.
I don’t have all the details to the case, but after reading the article I kinda think they got it wrong.
Let that man call himself Lambo and keep the domain. As long as he isn’t pretending to represent another brand, such as Lamborghini.
They got it right because they sided with the wealthy corporation.
The court ruled that Blair lacked any right to the name and had only adopted the moniker after buying the domain.
So he wasn't rich enough to buy the domain that he paid for ?
Let A.I. have the internet. Humans are done using it.
Not sure why others are defending the defendant here. He was just a cyber squatter who had no ties to the name Lambo until after he bought the domain. His only goal was to resell it to Lamborghini for a profit.
I mean, if we are going to capitalism with a straight face we have to start being the whole bitch.
He owned it, Lamborghini wanted it... that made it a valuable asset that he held that Lamborghini should have paid for
it's easy to see it that way when a big corporation is involved, but average people and small businesses get fucked by cybersquatters too.
On balance I tend to side against the cybersquatters. They are not providing any value to anyone, just leeching dollars from the economy.
Both ends of this are frustrating. Buying a domain either as a purely speculative asset (as the judge correctly labeled this purchase as) so you can 1) get under someones skin enough to make them want to buy the domain from you, or 2) just buying up every popular or potentially popular domain just to sell if off is scummy behaviour that ideally this guy should never have been able to do in the first place.
The other end of this I don’t like though is the possibility of somebody being able to convince a judge that they should own your domain and then just being able to take it. In this case I think the judge ruled correctly but the idea that somebody (especially in the US government) would be able to just take away my domain on a whim is terrifying when you can’t just go to people and say “hey, the person you are going to this domain for has now moved and is now here”. Things like e-mail address, monitoring, firewall exceptions and many self-hosted sites assume that the owner of the domain does not change hands without permission, and trust the domain blindly. Taking away a domain isn’t just like taking away somebodies nickname. It’s taking away their online identity and forced impersonation.
I really wish there was a way to address each other in a decentralised way that doesn’t just push the problem down to something like a public key, where the same problem exists except now you worry about the key being compromised.
The fact that we have ways to coordinate globally unique addresses that we collectively agree on who owns what is a feat. It just sucks that it’s also something which somebody can take away from you.
I recently took over as webmaster for a small local charity, basic website, some backend things to sort, no big deal.
But they're on a .net and I asked why? A previous webmaster let their domain lapse 10 FUCKING YEARS AGO, and one of those squatters grabbed it and has been holding it ever since. They wanted like $10k to give it back so these people just made a .net
It's fucking ridiculous. I set a timer to try and grab it next time it expires, but I'm assuming they have their renewals automated.
I don't get it. Since when are similar words and cultural references and nicknames too owned by the trademark owner?
It was pretty normal for most of the age of trademarks' existence to use such derived references, including commercial use.
"He tried to claim ... a word play on "lamb" and not ... " - why would he have to?
I'm (ok, not really identifying as a fan of anything, but it's good) a Star Wars fan and I can point out plenty of such references there to other authors' creations, and George Lucas notably doesn't hide or deny that, actually the opposite.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
