Objections to comments filed by IPC on .Net renewal agreement

[Divya Mistry <divya@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To whom it may concern:

I am a Bioinformatics PhD student at Iowa State University, and are employed
at the same. The following statements and opinions are that of myself, and I
do not represent my university and/or employer. The views 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

I address my opposition using *the same statement* made by Cory Doctorow of
BoingBoing.net of Happy Mutants, LLC.

==

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,