Objection to comments filed by the Intellectual Property Constituency

[Tim <tim@xxxxxxxxxx>]

To whom it may concern:



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 echo (and repeat below) the statement of Cory Doctorow, co-owner and
co-editor of BoingBoing.net.

==

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,

Timothy Ardoin
ardoin.net