Week Three - Writing Assignment

I think that "cybersquatting" should be legal in all instances. There are several arguments for and against this, and this is mine.

There should be no guidelines with reference to "Cybersquatting" because there are too many exceptions and the main problems are already addressed in our laws.

Current law states that people can have a domain name registered for five days before actually paying for it. This causes problems because people can see what amount of traffic that name would receive. If there is not enough to suit their purposes, they de-register the name at no cost to themselves. If this law is changed so that people must pay for the domain name as soon as they register it I think that a lot of these problems will go away. One of the reasons people do this is because they do not have to pay for it initially, so it is no real trouble to themselves.

The argument that ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is helping corporations more than private citizens is obvious and has no real bearing on the argument. Money has always been able to buy power; the internet has not made that better or worse.

The movie Citizen Kane is a perfect example of this. This movie, finished in 1941, was the first feature film directed by Orson Welles, who was also the lead actor. While the movie was literally about a fictional character named Charles Foster Kane, most people who saw it recognized it as being based on William Randolph Hearst's life. Hearst, currently most well-known for Hearst Castle, had much more power than Welles ever could possess. He was infuriated with the creation of the movie and took several steps to get rid of it. He first tried to buy the rights to it, for the express purpose of destroying all traces of it. When Welles refused to sell it, Hearst, who owned a media empire, used his power to boycott it. He forbid his papers to make any mention of it and threatened to ban advertising of any theaters which showed it. This intimidated the majority of the theaters, so it was not widely shown. Hearst went beyond this and started targeting Welles' livelihood. The movie did not do as good as hoped, due to Hearst's machinations, and every movie that Welles did afterwards was plagued by insufficient funds and studio interference. From then on he was unable to find work as a director at any of the major studios, and often did not find any investors in his independent projects. Welles was essentially exiled from Hollywood and he finally went to Europe in the hopes of being able to make a living. Much of his bad luck is attributed to his decision to go against a powerhouse, Hearst. One man was able to destroy another simply because he did not like the movie created.

This power struggle is now taking place in the internet instead of in newspapers, but other than location, nothing has changed.

In the context of domains that are dedicated to social or political commentary, if and when it becomes injuring to the subject being commented on, the subject has the cause to sue for defamation and libel. Otherwise the subject must find another way of fighting back, rather then taking away the use of the domain name, and thus the rights of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech, including what is written down, and it violates this to restrict what people can say on the internet and where they can say them.

With regards to the idea of people registering someone else’s name and then trying to sell it to them. That is already illegal, it's called extortion. Again, this is something that people have done long before the creation of the internet.

The main reason "cybersquatting" should be legal is exemplified in Nissan Computer's Battle with Nissan Motor. Nissan is his name, thus he has the rights to it. The definition of extortion is "the act or practice of extorting especially money or other property" with extorting being defined as "to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power." My question for this is, isn't Nissan Motor trying to extort Nissan Computer?

Signing off,

Alyssa Potok