objection to Intellectual Property Constituency comments

[Scott Merrill <skippy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

To whom it may concern:

I am a .net domain owner. I am writing to express my objections to the
comments filed by the Intellectual Property Constituency, available
here:

http://forum.icann.org/lists/net-agreement-renewal/pdfTeYfTqqAOg.pdf

==

1. DOMAIN SEIZURES DON'T WORK AND ARE DISPROPORTIONATE

The past year has seen ample evidence that domain seizures don't work.
The extrajudicial, streamlined rough justice that the IPC and its
members advocate resulted in the erroneous seizure of 80,000 websites
and their replacement with an incorrect warning that they had
previously hosted child pornography.

http://boingboing.net/2011/02/17/dhs-erroneously-seiz.html

Meanwhile, practically every site seized went back up immediately. Of
course, some of the seized sites had been found legal in their local
courts, so it's not surprising:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/do-domain-seizures-keep-streaming-sites-down.ars

Site operators accused of copyright infringement should be sued in the
appropriate courts, which can issue injunctions during or after the
proceeding, on the basis of evidence. It is not appropriate to ask
Verisign to adjudicate technically complex copyright claims. The
outcome will be similar to what we've seen already: overreaching
claims, seizures of legitimate sites, and a shoot-first,
ask-questions-later approach characteristic of the IPC's members.

==

2. PRIVATE DOMAIN REGISTRATION IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG

Unlike the IPC, myself and many other domain registrants are private
individuals, lacking a commercial office, PO box or other address for
use in domain registration. Compelling registrars to publish their
customers' home addresses on the public Internet isn't a "best
practice" -- it's a privacy disaster in the making, a gift to identity
thieves and stalkers, and anything but common sense. I don't publish
my home address on the Internet, and neither do the people who pay the
bills at the IPC. Why should everyone else be required to, just to
save the IPC's members the trouble of securing a court order when they
believe their rights are being infringed?

==

For these reasons, I ask that you disregard the comments of the IPC in
their entirety.

Thank you,
Scott Merrill