Is Afternic being honest concerning it’s anti-gay stance?

I could kick myself for asking that question. I hate people calling each other intolerant. Sounds like I’m some lib professor in a U.S. university talking about the latest multiculturalist speech codes we’re forcing on our indoctrinated kids. I hate all that diversity-crap talk. I’m actually mostly a conservative. But I’m also a social libertarian. I really don’t care what people do in their own lives. So it pisses me off that Afternic is not allowing gay domain names to be listed under the guise of the names being sexual or obscene.

To be more precise, it’s not that they are not allowing gay names, but that are being DISHONEST about their policy. Here’s what they said when they disallowed Robogay.com to be listed (I have had a few other “gay” names rejected):

Thank you for submitting your name(s) to Afternic for listing. We have made a commitment to our visitors to not show names which promote hate, sex, obscenity or self-destructive behavior, such as substance abuse, violence or gambling. In addition, we cannot list names which violate trademarks, servicemarks, copyrights or other materials protected under US or international law.

Does saying the word “gay” promotes sex , or is obscene, any more than saying the word “straight?” If I submitted RoboStraight.com or RobotHetero.com, would Afternic deny it? No way.

Afternic is not simply filtering out porn, sexual or indecent behavior, they are singling out gay domain names. RoboGay.com does not promote sex any more than RoboStraight.cojm does. And they know it.

It’s a private company, so I firmly believe that they can do as they wish. Seriously. I don’t give crap–I hardly have any gay names. All I want is for them to be honest enough to write the rules as they actually view them: NO GAY NAMES!

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, gay, homosexual, diversity, intolerance, minority

Just found this Guide to Registering a Trademark for a Domain Name on the U.S. Patent and Trademark website. Thought it might be of interest to you.

Is changing one letter in a trademarked word an infringement? Would a site called Microloft.info infringe on the Microsoft mark? Apparently the Church of Scientology thinks so. Or maybe they are simply not interested in any more bad press than they are already getting with Tom Cruise as their motor-mouth spokesman.

From the Newsday.com article, Mock them using another name:

Some things just aren’t funny — at least to the Church of Scientology.

A New Zealand-based website that says it is devoted to “exposing Tom Cruise’s moronic behavior in his relentless crusade to promote the Church of Scientology” has been ordered by church lawyers to stop using the domain name www.scienTOMogy.info.

The reason: Web surfers might confuse it with the real thing.

The site states that it has no connection with the Church of Scientologists and offers a link to the Scientology home page. Then it post links to a series of videos of Cruise talking about Scientology, including a sci-fi video parody of the actor’s infamous May television appearance on “Oprah,” in which he appears to electrocute her.

“The site is purely satirical and is for entertainment, and consists of links to other sites — it contains no fact nor claims to do so and is completely non-commercial,” the website said.

The creator of the website could not be reached by press time Tuesday. Church of Scientology attorney Helena Kobrin, a partner in Moxon & Kobrin law firm, said the letter was intended to protect the Scientology name.

“You can’t use someone else’s trademarks to promote your own agenda,” Kobrin said, adding that organizations routinely defend the integrity of their trademarks and copyrights. “Changing one letter is the trick of the infringer to try to get around the law, but the law makes it very clear that you can’t do that.”

The scienTOMogy.info website has posted an exchange with Moxon & Kobrin lawyer Ava M. Paquette, which began in September, in which Paquette warned that the Church of Scientology owns the trademark to the word Scientology.

“The fact that you have changed one letter (’m’ instead of ‘l’) does not protect you from trademark infringement,” Paquette wrote before pointing out that infringing on a trademark could lead to a $100,000 fine. Paquette then demanded that the domain name be transferred to the Church of Scientology.

The website responded that it was using the name legally.

The letter isn’t the first time Scientology lawyers have claimed that websites had violated its trademark. San Francisco anti-Scientology activist Kristi Wachter received a similar letter from Kobrin four years ago after she registered the domain name www.truthaboutscientology.com.

Wachter said Tuesday that, after an exchange of letters, the Scientology lawyers appeared to drop the issue. But a few weeks ago, she said, her Web host was forced to temporarily remove more than 600 pages from her site after Scientology lawyers accused her of copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Act. When no formal legal challenge was filed after four weeks, the pages were restored.

“I decided not to spend any further time on it because I decided she was just trying to intimidate me, or distract me,” Wachter said.

Here’s a thought: if Tom Cruise would think before he speaks, the website might never have existed.

Technorati Tags: internet, domain, domain name, trademark, tom cruise, scientology

Every time a domain name that has a trademark within it is discussed on the various domain boards, one or more people always bring up the warning that there will be trademark problems. Now, I’m still relatively new at this domain stuff, but from what I’ve heard from experts, and read myself, is that just having a trademark within the domain name is not on its own a problem.

As a practical matter, if your name is not trying to fool visitors into thinking you are the owner of the trademark in question, and you are not disparaging the trademark or its owner, you’re not going to get called on it. Of course, the company’s lawyers can do whatever hassling they wish, so you never know. But, take my previous web site for example–GoogleTutor.com. I wrote positive and helpful articles about Google, helping the world best utilize their product. No one thought I was a Google representative. Google didn’t seem to care. Why would they? I’ll bet they liked my articles. Now, if my domain name was GoogleInvestorRelations.com or GoogleSucks.com, they might.

As for ICANN yanking your domain name from you, they have set in writing very clear guidelines. For them to take your domain name, all three of the following has to be true:

(i) your domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights; and

(ii) you have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and

(iii) your domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith.

Just what’s bad faith? They’ve defined that too:

(i) circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name; or

(ii) you have registered the domain name in order to prevent the owner of the trademark or service mark from reflecting the mark in a corresponding domain name, provided that you have engaged in a pattern of such conduct; or

(iii) you have registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of disrupting the business of a competitor; or

(iv) by using the domain name, you have intentionally attempted to attract, for commercial gain, Internet users to your web site or other on-line location, by creating a likelihood of confusion with the complainant’s mark as to the source, sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of your web site or location or of a product or service on your web site or location.

I’m interested in your comments…

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, internet, icann, trademark

A few weeks ago I picked up the deleted domain ShutUpHillary.com through SnapNames.com for the $60 fee. With her possible Senate reelection run, and her most definite plans to run for president in 2008, this was a good purchase. Rather than sitting around waiting for someone to purchase it from me, I thought about how I might make some money from it right now.

I’m experienced in creating and selling CafePress.com products, and political items are their biggest sellers. So, it was a natural fit and I created the Shut Up Hillary store there. I’ve got just a few items up to get started. But, here’s the great thing I’m doing with this. Usually when you create a product on CafePress.com, others tend to imitate it and siphon off some of the sales. But, if one owns the trademark for the image or wording on the products, CafePress.com will shut copycats down as soon as they are notified by the trademark owner. There’s really no fighting it. So, I went out and filed for the trademark “Shut Up Hillary” in the proper class for selling these goods. No one else will be able to create Shut Up Hillary products.

The trademark filing fee was $270, but that’s nothing compared to what I can make on CafePress.com. I’ve done it before. And now, they’ve got a new affiliate program just coming out of beta, which will help to increase sales.

The domain name right now is simply pointing to my store (whose design I know I have to improve). I’m stuck with Register.com for 60 days since that’s who I had to continue using via this SnapNames sale. Register.com unbelievably will not let me redirect the domain to the store without them framing it and putting an add of their’s at the bottom of the page. Try clicking on ShutUpHillary.com and see for yourself. They charge $50 a year to redirect without the ad! I’m not paying them for that. I’ll wait until my 60 days are up and then move it to GoDaddy.com.

Just pointing the domain name to the CafePress.com page is good, but not the optimum. It’s not necessarily sending traffic to the domain name. I’m going to think about creating a site for the domain, with some Hillary content and with links to the store. I could write a blog in it, but the last time I did something political like that it burned me out (made me hate things about BOTH sides).

Anyway, I thought I’d share what I’m doing with CafePress.com since it is something you might be interested in doing with some of your domain names.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, internet, hillary, hillary clinton, clinton, cafepress

I saw the following interesting post at Slashdot.com here. A series of great comments followed it; page down on the page to read them.

“Slashdot has covered stories where big mean companies threw poor little people off of web sites with names too close to that of the company. But what about when you are the company and the cybersquatter isn’t even using the name? I have a small (ok, basically just me) company. The web site that exactly matches my company name has been registered since 2001, which is before I legally registered my company name but after I started doing business. Despite being registered for 4 years, the site is still nothing but a pile of banner ads - not even a hint as to why they want that particular name for their site. I contacted the owner, but they are not interested in selling (at any price, they said). If I read the ICANN guidelines correctly, domain name owners who have ‘no legitimate claim for the name’ can be evicted by people who do, so I think I should be able to demand they hand the name over. Has anybody ever tried this, or heard of a case where somebody with very limited funds (ie, not enough money to hire a lawyer) has been able to evict a squatter? Or do you always have to hire a lawyer and pay thousands in court fees to make this happen?”

Of all the comments, I love this one the best:

This is a great idea! I’ll find some web site which has nothing but banner ads. Then I’ll start a business with the same name. After I do that, I’ll go to court and sue, demanding that the owners of that domain turn it over to me.

Maybe the current domain owners are holding on to the domain in the hopes of one day starting a business in their state/country with that name. Maybe they are ranked well enough search engines that the banner ads are profitable. Whatever the case may be, it’s their domain and I don’t understand why you think that your business interests should trump theirs.

Face it: You screwed up. You started a business without registering the domain(s) appropriate for that name.

By they way, I found this story by reading the Google Feed I set up in the sidebar on the right. All those feeds are really useful, but I see hardly anyone ever clicks on them. You’re really missing out.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, ICANN, internet, cyberquatter, business

Here’s a very important decision just handed down, as written up at CircleID.com:

Jerry Falwell Critic Can Keep Domain Name, Appeals Court Says
Aug 25, 2005
Source: CircleID Legal Issues
By Paul Alan Levy

I want to call your attention to a very important Internet free speech decision, perhaps the most significant of our domain name cases from the past several years. In Lamparello v. Falwell, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held today that the use of the domain name www.fallwell.com for a web site devoted to denouncing the views of Rev. Jerry Falwell about homosexuality neither infringes Falwell’s trademark in his name nor constitutes “cybersquatting.” The court chose not to address the issue of whether the non-commercial character of our client’s web site was sufficient to excuse it from the coverage of the trademark laws, because it was so clear that his web site did not create any likelihood of confusion about whether Falwell sponsored it. The court ruled that, where the web site is clear about being adverse to the interests of the trademark holder, the fact that the domain name for the web site resembles the trademark is not a reason to find infringement, because the domain name must be considered in the context of the web site.

The decision is important for two other reasons. First, it is a decision by the same court that ruled against the web site operator in the “People Eating Tasty Animals” case, PETA v Doughney. There, the operator of a web site at www.peta.org (now accessible at www.mtd.com/tasty) was found guilty of both infringement and cybersquatting. It has always been my feeling that the case turned on the fact that Doughney was plainly trying to hit PETA up for a payment for the domain name, but the case has been widely if incorrectly cited in briefs as standing for the proposition that a domain name in the form www.trademark.com was impermissible for a gripe site. That the same court that issued PETA has now made clear this construction of its opinion was erroneous - and Judge Michael, a member of the panel in Falwell, was also one of the judges in PETA - could well signal the end of the line for lawsuits of this kind.

Second, this opinion contains some welcome skepticism about the doctrine of “initial interest confusion,” a trademark law analysis that some courts have deployed rather carelessly over the past several years to find trademark infringement even though there was no consumer confusion about whether a product or service was sponsored by a trademark holder. Trademark law has always protected against only a substantial likelihood of confusion by the reasonable consumer, and not against “temporary confusion” or confusion caused wholly by consumer carelessness. In some of the early Internet infringement cases, there was some tendency to “baby” consumers by assuming that Internet users are stupid and that domain names can easily mislead them way from the web sites of trademark holders. By holding that “initial interest confusion” is not present here, in part because of flaws in the doctrine and in part because it does not apply to non-commercial criticism anyway, the court has written a decision that may play an important role in the development of trademark law apart from the issue of domain names and the Internet.

Read full story

Technorati Tags: falwell, jerry falwell, fallwell, domain, domain name, trademark