please disregard IPC comments

[Darren Wershler <darren@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To whom it may concern:

I am the owner and editor of alienated.net, a website I have maintained for 
over a decade, and a university professor with expertise in the field of 
cultural ownership and the Internet. 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

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.

Like myself, 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, I ask that you disregard the comments of the IPC in their 
entirety.

Thank you,

Dr. Darren Wershler



Dr. Darren Wershler

Department of English, LB 685-3

Concordia University

1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W

Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8

514-848-2424 e. 2349

fax 514-848-4501

d.wershler@xxxxxxxxxxxx

darren@xxxxxxxxxxxxx