TechCrunch reports that its brand has been taken as a Twitter name, and that there is a landrush going on to get these names, which are already trading for money. The problem is so bad that a name brokerage, Tweexchange, has sprung up to get to facilitate sales. more
I was looking at the End User License Agreement to which Skype wants people to assent. I noticed the following odd provision (Section 3.2.4): You hereby grant to Skype a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable licence to Use the Content in any media in connection with the Skype Software, the Products and the Skype Website. more
Analysis could also affect liability of enterprises using cloud computing technologies... Local elected official Steinbach had an email account that was issued by the municipality. Third party Hostway provided the technology for the account. Steinbach logged in to her Hostway webmail account and noticed eleven messages from constituents had been forwarded by someone else to her political rival. more
Over the next month, the ICANN Board will consider its options for ensuring that some framework is in place to ensure ICANN's accountability to the global Internet community after the approaching expiration of its Memorandum of Understanding and Joint Project Agreement (MOU/JPA) with the U.S. Department of Commerce. We analyze these options in our new paper... more
On Wednesday, Project Honey Pot filed an unusual lawsuit against "John Does stealing money from US businesses through unauthorized electronic transfers made possible by computer viruses transmitted in spam." Their attorney is Jon Praed of the Internet Law Group, who is one of the most experienced anti-spam lawyers around, with whom I have worked in the past. more
For years, corporate domain name administrators have scoffed at every new second-level and third-level country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) liberalization, and rightly so. Until recently, most had continued the practice of registering significant numbers of variations, misspellings and typo-squats. While I have never encouraged the practice of registering every variation in every geography, as this becomes prohibitively expensive over time... With what seems to be the imminent launch of hundreds of new TLDs as a result of ICANN's new initiative, companies appear to be saying enough is enough, and meaning it. more
Peer to peer download services are still popular with music-loving kids, it seems. The second annual survey of young people's music consumption by pressure group UK Music found that three-fifths of the 1,808 18-24 year olds who took part said they used p2p services, and four-fifths of those did so at least once a week. This is almost the same as last year's result, and would seem to indicate that the efforts by the music industry to offer a range of licensed alternatives to Limewire and other p2p services have failed to have any real impact. more
The FCC has run three days of workshops on the National Broadband Plan now, for the purpose of bringing a diverse set of perspectives on broadband technology and deployment issues to the attention of FCC staff. You can see the workshop agendas here. The collection of speakers is indeed very diverse. As you would expect, the session on eGov featured a number of government people and a larger collection of folks from the non-profit sector, all but one of whom has a distinctly left-of-center orientation. Grass-roots devolution arguments have a leftish and populist flavor, so who better to make the argument than people from left-of-center think tanks? more
I recently learned about a meeting that took place between ICANN staff and Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) members Kathy Kleiman and Konstantinos Komaitis regarding the Implementation Recommendations Team (IRT) recommendations for the protection of intellectual property rights in new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). My comment relates to the White Paper published by Ms. Kleiman and Mr. Komaitis with respect to the notion of having multiple Regional Trademark clearinghouses (TMCs). For the reasons stated in this comment, the KK Proposal fails a number of the benchmarking checklists used by the IRT in evaluating proposals. more
When CAN-SPAM was passed in 2003, it was fairly clear that Congress wasn't trying to enable broad private enforcement. Everyone knew that rabid anti-spammers would seize any new statutory right for a litigation frenzy... Although I personally think Congress would better served all of us by omitting all private enforcement rights in CAN-SPAM, unquestionably the private rights in CAN-SPAM are drafted narrowly to prevent their abuses. That hasn't stopped some zealous anti-spammers from testing the limits of CAN-SPAM's private enforcement remedies anyway. more
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