Law

Law Enforcement Agencies Will Have Authority on Registries and Registrars

Accessing Whois information and acting on a litigious domain name is becoming a nightmare for law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement agencies must have an access to the information provided by registrants in the Whois database and, in specific cases, have authority to act FAST on a domain name. The EU has a solution for this and it's coming in 2020. more

Notice, Takedown, Borders, and Scale

I was on the front lines of the SOPA wars, because SOPA touched on two matters of strong personal and professional importance for me: protecting the Internet infrastructure, and protecting the economy from Internet related crime. I've continued to study this field and advise industry participants in the years since then. The 2017-02-20 paper by Annemarie Bridy entitled Notice and Takedown in the Domain Name System: ICANN's Ambivalent Drift into Online Content Regulation deserves an answer, which I shall attempt here. more

Declaring and Declining to Find Reverse Domain Name Hijacking

What to one panelist is clearly bad faith conduct in filing a UDRP complaint, to another is excusable for lack of proof. The disagreement over reverse domain name hijacking centers on the kind of evidence necessary to justify it and the nature of the burden. RDNH is defined as "using the UDRP in bad faith to attempt to deprive a registered domain-name holder of a domain name." Rule 1, Definitions. more

Special Interests Circulating Draft Legislation to Cut Short ICANN’s Whois Policy Process

Special interests who oppose privacy are circulating draft legislation to cut short ICANN's Whois policy process, warns Milton Mueller in a post published today in Internet Governance Project. more

CircleID’s Top 10 Posts of 2008

Here is a list of the most viewed news and blog postings that were featured on CircleID in 2008... Best wishes for 2009 and Happy New Year from all of us here at CircleID. more

Registrar Abacus America is in Corporate Delinquency

KnujOn has retrieved a document indicating that the ICANN-Accredited Registrar Abacus America is in Corporate Delinquency in the state of Kansas. Kansas defines a company as Delinquent if "The business entity has not filed its annual report and fee by the due date." ... This incident is significant because Abacus America was cited by LegitScript and KnujOn for sponsoring an unlicensed pharmacy selling Schedule 3 substances... more

UDRP Complaint: Actually, a Motion for Summary Judgment

Trademark owners (and here I'm talking about those with U.S. registrations even if they are foreign entities) have a choice of forum for challenging alleged cybersquatting domain names. They can either sue in district court under the ACPA, or get a quicker and less expensive result by filing a complaint and asserting a claim under the UDRP. But to get to a quicker and less expensive result everything about the process is accelerated, and this begins with drafting the complaint. more

Virginia Court Throws Out Spam Law; One Spammer Gets Away With It

The 2004 criminal spam case against large-scale spammer Jeremy Jaynes, which I've covered in several previous blog entries, appears to have come to an ignominious end with the state supreme court throwing out the law under which he was convicted. The Virginia anti-spam law was one of the first in the country with criminal provisions, but it failed due to the way that First Amendment cases are treated differently from all other cases. more

Google Confirms That Keyword Metatags Don’t Matter

Few Internet technologies have horked cyberlaw as much as keyword metatags. Back in the 1990s, some search engines indexed keyword metatags, which encouraged some websites to stuff their keyword metatags as a way of gaming the rankings. Judges took a dim view of this practice, largely because the surreptitious nature of keyword metatags seemed inherently sinister, regardless of their efficacy. In the interim, search engines wizened up. more

UK Bill Ups Prison Term for Online Piracy from 2 to 10 Years

The UK government has unveiled its latest Digital Economy Bill as part of an "ambition for the UK to be the most digital nation in the world". more

Cheers! Registries and Registrars Doing the Right Thing by Patients

Domain name registration is a hot industry. Registrars represent a growing multi-billion dollar industry with the keys to the Internet for any organization hoping to have a web presence. Further, because of their role as one of the gatekeepers to the Internet, registrars have the unique ability and are often asked to take action against illegal activity online. This fact was highlighted in the report released this week by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the 2015 Out-of-Cycle Notorious Markets List. more

Domaining Registrar Defeats Cybersquatting Lawsuit: Philbrick v. eNom

Philbrick's Sports is a New Hampshire retailer of sporting goods. eNom's customer registered two domain name variants of Philbrick Sport's website. When the customer didn't pay eNom, eNom took the names back for itself... Each of these domain names were parked with Yahoo, who displayed sponsored ads on the domains. Philbrick's then sued eNom, claiming cybersquatting and trademark infringement. more

Internet Vigilantism

Atrivo (aka Intercage), a Concord, California-based Internet hosting service, disappeared from the Internet for around two days recently. They didn't go bankrupt or suffer a physical catastrophe. Their providers simply shut them down by refusing their traffic. This might very well be the first time in history that the Internet community, a cooperative association of networks with no governing body, has collectively put someone out of business, if only briefly. more

A Copycat Canadian Privacy Suit Against Gmail

In July, several people filed attempted class action suits against Google, on the peculiar theory that Gmail was spying on its own users' mail. One of the suits was in Federal court, the other two in California state court, but the complaints were nearly identical so we assume that they're coordinated.Now we have a similar suit filed in provincial court in British Columbia, Canada. more

How a Plaintiff Was Undeceived and Lost at Spam Litigation - What Nobody Told You About!

Back in 2003, there was a race to pass spam legislation. California was on the verge of passing legislation that marketers disdained. Thus marketers pressed for federal spam legislation which would preempt state spam legislation. The Can Spam Act of 2003 did just that... mostly. "Mostly" is where litigation lives. According to the Can Spam Act preemption-exception... more