Comments of Happy Mutants, LLC

[Cory Doctorow <doctorow@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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To whom it may concern:

I am a co-owner and co-editor of BoingBoing.net, owned by Happy Mutants,
LLC, on whose behalf I write today. I am writing to express Happy
Mutants' 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 Happy Mutants or the IPC, many 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. We don't publish our home
addresses 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, we ask that you disregard the comments of the IPC in
their entirety.

Thank you,


Cory Doctorow
Happy Mutants, LLC

PO Box 306
128 Aldersgate Street
London, UK
EC1A 4AE

(not my home address)

- -- 
Cory Doctorow
doctorow@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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