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The Internet Your Rights Online

Molson Slapped in Domain Hijacking Attempt 48

Posted by michael from the some-justice-to-be-had-after-all dept.
Lew Pitcher writes "Well, it took a Canadian court to find that a Canadian citizen can own the domain name canadian.biz without being a beer (or a beer company). The Toronto Star is reporting that the Ontario Superiour Court has overruled ICANN's decision to take domain canadian.biz from its current owner and give it to Molson's Breweries (makers of "Canadian" brand beer). A spokesperson for Molsons gave the obligatory statement about disappointment in the decision, and indicated that it was too early to determine if Molsons would appeal the decision. Score one against the bad guys."
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Molson Slapped in Domain Hijacking Attempt More

Molson Slapped in Domain Hijacking Attempt

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  • Little guys (Score:3, Funny)

    by ThereIsNoSporkNeo ( 587688 ) on Friday July 19, 2002 @09:02AM (#3916222)
    Damn... I bet my money on the big guys.

    The fact that I can never win a bet altered the course of history, allowing the little guy to win. A victory for society... BUT WHAT ABOUT MY LUNCH MONEY!

    The inconsolable and hungry-

  • Blame ICANNada (Score:3, Interesting)

    by freerangegeek ( 451133 ) on Friday July 19, 2002 @09:12AM (#3916284)
    When I read about this in the previous slashdot posting, I was shocked that ICANN had ruled the way it had. Once again, money talks.

    Kudo's to the Canadian court, but do they really have jurisdiction over ICANN? Does anyone? Or has this monster finally taken a life of it's own?

    The precedent remains an appalling one.

    I keep coming back to the concept of "Treehouse" from Tad William's Otherland series. Originally he conceived of it as a 'kill file' turned inside out. (Guess he used to be a USENET afficianado.)

    Maybe it's time to create a TREEHOUSE of own with a set of new root DNS server shared on a P2P network. (Of course this TREEHOUSE would be conceived of as a DNS system turned inside out.) I can serve abcdxxxx.com through abdexxxx.com! ;)

    By now there has to be sufficient bandwidth out there to support something like this. Good grief if we have enough spare cycles to find extraterrestrial life (seti.org) and bankrupt the RIAA with Napster, we have compute power to leave ICANN in the dust.

    • Kudo's to the Canadian court, but do they really have jurisdiction over ICANN? Does anyone?

      From the article: But because the arbitration panel [ICANN] has no established appeal process, and can be overruled by a court of law, Black took his case to the Ontario Superior Court.

      So, apparently any soveriegn nation has this type of jurisdiction over ICANN. So, when ICANN goes out and does something stupid (such as this decision), the courts of the nation(s) affected can correct the problem.

      Getting ready to go out and do something stupid,

      • Re:Blame ICANNada (Score:3, Interesting)

        by daoine ( 123140 )
        So, apparently any soveriegn nation has this type of jurisdiction over ICANN. So, when ICANN goes out and does something stupid (such as this decision), the courts of the nation(s) affected can correct the problem.

        Which begs the question, what the hell does ICANN do now anyway? If two people have a dispute over a domain, ICANN will rule, and then the loser will take the winner to court. Why not skip the ICANN step, and head straight to court?

        Unless the loser is a little guy who can't afford to take a big company to court... But then, wouldn't it be better if said little guy just got bought out rather than lost through arbitration?

        I'm not sure what the point of an arbitrator is if the arbitration is mostly meaningless...

        • Re:Blame ICANNada (Score:3, Informative)

          by Xunker ( 6905 )
          If I understand this right, and I'd like to think I do, it's a lot more simple than that..

          ICANN is just a holding company -- you can think of them like a Record Label or soemthing -- where their job is simply to overview distribution of the product, domain names.

          ICANN is an international orgainization and so it could be considered, by a stretch of the imagination, to be outside Canadian law.

          The ruling here (again, if I'm understanding this issue correctly) is no that they overturned ICANNS decision as much as they simply made their own. They're not saying ICANN can't give Molson the domain as they are saying that Molson, as a Canadian company, is not allowed to own it.

          This is a pretty big deal because A) it show that sometimes the small guy wins and B) that nations can express independant views from ICANN.
          • US courts are going to give a lot of deference to an arbitrators decision as long as the parties agreed to arbitration, the process is fair, and the decision is not completely wrong. So if the decision is based on deciding which sides facts are correct, a court probably won't reverse an arbitrator's decision.

            But if the arbitrator makes a bad decision because he can't properly apply the rule of law to the facts, I would hope a court would take the case and reverse the decision.

            In other words, the arbitrator's decision shouldn't be given any more deference than would any trial court decision.
    • No, the canadian courts do not have jurisdiction over ICANN.

      They ABSOLUTELY have jurisdiction over MOLSON, as a company, as well as the individual who registered the domain in the first place.

    • Re:Blame ICANNada (Score:4, Informative)

      by EJB ( 9167 ) on Friday July 19, 2002 @02:43PM (#3918733) Homepage
      The ICANN rules state that you can always appeal against their decisions to a civil court. From their policy:

      "If an Administrative Panel decides that your domain name registration should be canceled or transferred, we will wait ten (10) business days (as observed in the location of our principal office) after we are informed by the applicable Provider of the Administrative Panel's decision before implementing that decision. We will then implement the decision unless we have received from you during that ten (10) business day period official documentation (such as a copy of a complaint, file-stamped by the clerk of the court) that you have commenced a lawsuit against the complainant in a jurisdiction to which the complainant has submitted under Paragraph 3(b)(xiii) of the Rules of Procedure. (In general, that jurisdiction is either the location of our principal office or of your address as shown in our Whois database ...)"

      So there is no issue about a court having jurisdiction over ICANN, since ICANN explicitly agrees to having another court hear the dispute.
    • Well, if you're looking for a DNS replacement, try OpenDNS [unrated.net]. Not distributed yet, so perhaps what you're looking for is FreeNet [freenetproject.org]?

      All the technology -- and the software, too -- is out there. People just need to start using it.

    • Re:Blame ICANNada (Score:3, Interesting)

      by topham ( 32406 )
      The easy part of this, both the individual and the company are Canadian. This puts full jurisdiction on the Canadian courts.

      The other thing is that the courts basicly stepped forward and said that something resembling a trademark ISNT necessarily a trademark and ICANN shouldn't treat it as such.

      "Canadian" is NOT a trademark of Molsens. "Molsen Canadian" is.
    • They've got laws up there that punish companies and politicians severely if they get into bed together, so to speak.
      Funny how that works out for justice.
      Stuff about how running a business is not a right, but a privilege. Profit is the reward for serving the community, and harming said community brings about dissolution and seizure of assets.

  • the horror! (Score:4, Funny)

    by incast ( 121639 ) on Friday July 19, 2002 @09:16AM (#3916303)
    how dare you call molson's "the bad guys?" I owe my healthy figure to them and their tasty, tasty beers.

    Let's hear it for the molson muscle!

  • Canadian courts Rule! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WEFUNK ( 471506 ) on Friday July 19, 2002 @10:42AM (#3916918) Homepage
    According to the Canadian Press [canoe.ca], the winning lawyer states that "On a legal level, it's the first case in Canada that a person who has lost their domain name at the quasi-arbitration stage ... has appealed to a Canadian court ... and it's the first case worldwide with respect to a dot-biz decision from a court."

    I hope this decisive victory (for common sense) sets some precedent for future decisions and helps to discourage at least some of the rampant ICANN abuses. Perhaps unlikely, but every victory counts.

    Finally, as a Canadian I love this line from The Star article: "We're all Canadian and everyone has the right to use that word. We successfully resisted Molson's attempt to turn us all into beer." Of course, I spent most of university trying to do the same thing to myself - but mostly without Molson's help.
    • I really hope your comment title was an intentional double-entendre.

      Virg

      • Re:Oh, Man! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by WEFUNK ( 471506 )
        I really hope your comment title was an intentional double-entendre.

        Yep. Although calling my shamelessly bad pun a 'double-entendre' suggests far more wit than it deserves. I wasn't sure if anyone would notice, based on this story being relegated to the boonies.

        On that note, until today I never realized how many positive stories are posted to YRO that never make it to the main section. Looking down at the list of recent stories, almost without exception the negative ones make it to the front page and the positive ones seem lucky to be accepted at all. I wouldn't really blame the editors either, it seems that the better the news - even really important good news - the fewer the comments, and that the real outrages post hof numbers. I suppose the bias we usually attribute to the mass media is a more general one that even applies to our own community.

        I suppose that good news is sometimes harder to comment on beyond a simple "I agree" - especially when it's a justification of common sense like this story. Still, I wish the Slashdot front page could be more balanced since it's otherwise such a good tool to gauge the state of affairs and trends in online rights.

        Wow - I didn't mean to turn a short off-topic reply into such a long rant!
      • I really hope your comment title was an intentional double-entendre.

        Oh, you mean like ICANN adian?

  • increasing irrelevance of bad beer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by epine ( 68316 ) on Friday July 19, 2002 @11:16AM (#3917168)

    Thankfully, most of Canada has a thriving microbrew industry these days that makes the national brands taste like sour corn syrup by comparison. The occassional batch stands against the best German or British exports, though not with great consistency.

    One strange thing is that the Guiness generally gets better the closer you get to Ireland. Once in a blue moon the Guiness on the west coast has a head you can properly sculpt. The Guiness in Halifax is generally reliable, and if you pick the right place, the Guiness in Montreal can often be excellent.

    Quebec is an interesting place beer wise. The beer selection tends to be fairly cosmopolitan. If you do chose a Quebec beer, it'll likely grow some hair on your chest. Barly retisa by the jug.

    Molsons primarily appeals to the kind of person were lack of surprise is the only requirement. There are so many good good beers and so many good bad beers, I can't understand why anyone would drink Molsons at all, but there's no explaining taste.

    I can see how the judge would look askance at Molson's attempt to patent the Maple Leaf. These days Tim Hortons is a much stronger national brand. They probably ran into the same problem that Microsoft faced in the court room: the judge was all too familiar with their product line.
    • The way I figure it is this. It's a combination of marketing (the micros do none of it on TV), and the fact that pepole want to be beer drinkers. You know, real men don't drink pansy girly drinks.

      Problem is that most people don't actually like beer. It's a taste that takes some getting used to, and most people can't be bothered. So they take the most inoffensive shite they can find (canadian, blue, coors lite, ad nauseum) and drink that so they can be "manly men" or "cool chicks."

      That and people just don't know any different. Give a molson drinker a GOOD lager instead of that horse piss, and most of the time they'll like it. Then it's a swift downhill slide from there to the more flavourful stuff. MMMM, BEER!
      • So they take the most inoffensive shite they can find...

        Having lived in Quebec for some 36 years, and legally been able to drink beer there for half of those, I've had my share of microbrews, imports, Labatt's, and Molson offerings.

        Molson's beers have got to be the most OFFensive beers I've ever had the misfortune to drink. I'd sooner drink Budweiser's version of sex in a canoe (fsking close to water) than anything from Molson -- it suggests itself to be the urine of a specimen of some yet undiscovered hideous species found only in the Canadian Shield (thankfully).

        • the urine of a specimen of some yet undiscovered hideous species found only in the Canadian Shield (thankfully).

          "weasel's piss strained through a mouldy balaclava helmet"

      • Re:increasing irrelevance of bad beer (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Papineau ( 527159 ) on Friday July 19, 2002 @01:27PM (#3918169) Homepage
        Another thing slows the spread of micros: the taxes per liter of beer. I believe (DISCLAIMER: I DO own 500 Unibroue stock) that the tax is higher for micros than for big breweries, so those can have a lower price because of that tax (I think it's something along 9 cents per liter for the big guys, to something around 28 cents per liter for the micros) in addition to scale economies.

        IIRC, the rationale for the tax difference is that it's easier for the government to control the cleanliness, etc. of the big guys, than it is to control the smaller ones. The micros are trying to get that tax uniformised, but of course the big breweries lobby against it.

        For Joe Sixpack, the price of his sixpack matters. If the micros' is a buck or two higher, there's a non negligible probability that he'll take the Coors Lite over the Blanche de Chambly, even though the latter won the Gold Medal of the Beverage Testing Institute of Chicago in 1997, 1998 and 1999.
        • For Joe Sixpack, the price of his sixpack matters. If the micros' is a buck or two higher, there's a non negligible probability that he'll take the Coors Lite over the Blanche de Chambly, even though the latter won the Gold Medal of the Beverage Testing Institute of Chicago in 1997, 1998 and 1999.

          I generally agree with your point, but if we're talking stereotypes here, I don't really see the "Joe Sixpack" demographic buying anything called "Blanche de Chambly" even if it was less than a pack of Bud or Blue.
          • I generally agree with your point, but if we're talking stereotypes here, I don't really see the "Joe Sixpack" demographic buying anything called "Blanche de Chambly" even if it was less than a pack of Bud or Blue.
            Ok, Jacques Sixpack, then. We're talking about Quebec beers, remember. For Joe Sixpack, say Waterloo Dark instead.

            Joe
    • These days Tim Hortons is a much stronger national brand.

      Tim Hortons is owned by Wendys. No longer Canadian, eh?

      Link. [wendys-invest.com]
    • I agree with you on most points, but Molson does put out the occasional good commercial. (Not that stupid Joe one, I'm thinking about pet beavers.)

      Ah, Tim Horton's, home away from home! Any overseas tourists who come here, please go to a Tim Horton's and order a medium double-double. It's the only way to properly understand us.
  • Too bad about the decision, by the way could you spare a beer or two , eh?
  • That's it. Those piss-ant's from up north aren't getting another penny of my beer-consumption budget! :)

    Andy
    • molson is one of many canadian beer makers. And according to many not the best. and by the way those people up north drink real beer.
  • This one seems to have a rather simple answer. Which came first, the word "Canadian" (in some popularity) or the Beer? Hmmm... maybe we were just called Canucks before the beer came around? This was a stupid ruling... while Molson is a good ol' Canadian beer (eh), it certainly doesn't give them a right to everything with "Canadian" in the name. After all, what about "Canadian Airlines" or "The Great Canadian Bagel"... perhaps "Canadian 2-for-1 Pizza?". By the standards of the original ICANN ruling, wouldn't this also give "American Airlines" (or perhaps *shudder* America online) first rights to america.biz or american.biz?

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