You can't run a $30 billion company on games - Bob Colwell, former Intel architect
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Big Content wants domain snatching made easier
THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY has written a stiff letter telling ICANN to make it a lot easier for its lawyers to threaten users with domain name takedown notices.
For a while in the US, lawyers working on behalf of the content industry have been threatening people who put copyrighted material on their websites with losing their domain names.
This has been the case with some bloggers who made the grave mistake of quoting a newspaper in their blogs.
It seems that the only problem with such threats is that it is too difficult for the content industry to actually take down a domain name legally.
However the letter to ICANN does not mention this. Instead it says that the music copyright trade associations are miffed with ICANN's latest Draft Application Guidebook for generic top level domains (gTLDs).
Victoria Scheckler, deputy general counsel of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) wrote that its overriding concern is to ensure that any music themed gTLD is used productively and responsibly, and not as a means to facilitate copyright or trademark infringement.
However the latest draft guidebook has "raised the bar dramatically for community objections" and makes it too hard to prove a case that would require an alleged copyright infringer to hand over a domain name.
"We fear that we will have no realistic ability to object if a pirate [sic] chooses to hijack a music themed gTLD to enable wide scale copyright infringement of our works," she said.
She threatened ICANN that unless it did what it was told, the RIAA would "escalate the issue further".
What seems to have sailed up the RIAA's nasal passages is that before ICANN takes away a domain name on Big Content's say so, there has to proof of material detriment to the rights or legitimate interests of its associated community and the broader Internet community.
The RIAA appears to want a website handed over if it simply makes an allegation and not have to worry about whether removing it causes material detriment to the broader Internet community. µ
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In the end we might have to do the old foreign country domains or use an alternative DNS or simply put up a hosts file on some dns.info site with a list of URL of made up tld that they can't touch, for instance .fu isn't in use I think.
"May flesh-eating bacteria gorge on their bloated, drug-ridden carcasses."
That's bloody insensitive. Even flesh-eating bacteria have a right to live a drug-free lifestyle!
Perhaps ICANN might want to suggest to them that if a site can be closed down simply upon the claim of copyright violation, then their sites would also be subject to such abuse. If the accusation is sufficient, then even a small group of people making claims at regular intervals could keep the big media sites almost permanently offline.
So, who has most to lose, hmmm?
If the music or movie industry wants to use the internet, then it should accept the internets T&Cs as part of the license under which it does so. It is, after all, no more than *they* would insist upon if the roles were reversed.
The internet worked perfectly well until those coke-addled morons started screwing everything up with DRM and product activation and all that crap. Now they want to dictate how domains are granted and rescinded as well?
May flesh-eating bacteria gorge on their bloated, drug-ridden carcasses.
Thanks for the use of "[Sic]" in the article.
Good to see a reporter not becoming complicit in Big Media propaganda by regurgitating this "pirate / piracy" bullsh*t without question.
Part of Big Media's agenda (to gain ever increasing powers) is to conflate copyright infringement with something much more serious, so that draconian actions to combat it then seem entirely justified.
"Piracy" may just be a word, but the widespread acceptance of it to mean "copyright infringement" changes people's perception of it.
As has been said before, it's surprising that Big Media have not started to call it "data kidnapping" or "bit rape".