Summary of Net Legislation

CNET News.com ran a story today, "Congress Passes Slew of High-Tech Bills." It's a look back at what U.S. legislators have been doing throughout 1999. The EFF summarizes this year's crop of laws as "anti-consumer, anti-public and pro-business."

Big business interests...

[wesmills]

I particularly like the part about how future legislation in this area will primarily further big business interests. As they mentioned, companies are using Congress to slug out their competitive differences, and the consumers get trampled for it.

Ah well...is Canada any better?

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Cybersquatting and rights to a URL

[nlvp]

I see that the article spends a considerable amount of time focusing on the new cybersquatting rules [cnet.com]. Basically, the rules seem to state that a company's name cannot be registered as a web address by a third party if it is a registered trademark.

After reading a fair amount about the M.I.T. case, I understand why it can be considered offensive to have a validly registered net name taken from you by a big corporation. But surely this is just one aspect.

Anna Friel (a Uk actress) has a website, but it had to be hosted on a different URL than www.annafriel.co.uk because that name had been taken by a pr0n site. I think she got the URL back, and I think that any legislation that would have made that any easier is a good thing.

How should the law be formulated in order to prevent abuse of a trademark, acknowledging that big corporations have a right to market their names on the internet and protect any equity they have built up over time, whilst at the same time protecting the small company or the individual from having their web address taken from them?

Everything I read on this issue offers up a lot of criticism of the law, the big corporations, but very few proposed solutions that don't end up being to someone's detriment.

The article mentions that the bill might be used to prevent net names such as AolSucks.Com [aolsucks.com] from being registered. Since that one actually exists, is there a real threat there and could the bill be used in this way?