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4chan demands 4chan.com domain name

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Re: 4chan demands 4chan.com domain name

#61

Post by mdesq »

Shinkei wrote: post #24

Let's say I run a town with shopping centers. Both are called Main Street Shopping but one is located on Main St and 1st and the other is located at Main St and 120th. When you show up at Main St and 1st, is it a bussling shopping center filled with stores of all kinds. When you GPS Main Street Shopping Center and accidentally arrive at the other location, you just find a parking lot with an empty field with a "comin…

> This is the whole 'eminent domain' debate in a nutshell.

Actually, a lot of the debate about eminent domain is who is on the receiving end of the property. Eminent domain is supposed to be about the taking of private property for public use. E.g., building a school. It gets a lot more dicey when you start taking A's private property and making it B's private property.

Re: 4chan demands 4chan.com domain name

#62

Post by Macha »

Shinkei wrote: post #24

Let's say I run a town with shopping centers. Both are called Main Street Shopping but one is located on Main St and 1st and the other is located at Main St and 120th. When you show up at Main St and 1st, is it a bussling shopping center filled with stores of all kinds. When you GPS Main Street Shopping Center and accidentally arrive at the other location, you just find a parking lot with an empty field with a "comin…

I own a domain name that is basically mynamemyindustry.com . It is of zero value to anyone else who doesn't share my name, which isn't too common.

Someone bought myname s myindustry.com and occasionally sends me an email that it's going up for auction soon and enquires if I'm interested. I've just ignored them in the hope they get the point. They have been trying to make it seem like there's lots of other demands, when there's absolutely no reason to buy it other than the kind of similarity to my domain.

It can't even be profitable typosquatting. Nowdays the domain just redirects to a newer domain of mine and has been for a number of years, so in the unlikely event that someone tried to type in my current domain exactly and mispelled it, they still wouldn't end up on that domain. The only reason I keep up the registration is Google's inability to swap the primary domain on Google Apps.

Re: 4chan demands 4chan.com domain name

#64

Post by mikeash »

jarradhope wrote: post #60
mikeash wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eminent domain isn't used to avoid waste. Rather, it's used to acquire land that you need for something important. As far as I understand it, if I'm wasting a bunch of land and refuse to sell it, but there's a million acres next door that you can buy for pennies and your project will work just as well there as it would on my land, there's no case for eminent domain. Go buy that other land and build there. Eminent dom…

> The supply of domain names is effectively infinite If you don't mind going to places like, adjkdhad3fnnkjd.com for all your future services, at which point domains lose their intended use, you might as well just remember and type out the ip number.

The supply of pronounceable, human-readable, reasonably memory domains is also effectively infinite. There are even lots of short ones left available.

Re: 4chan demands 4chan.com domain name

#65

Post by Dylan16807 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #54
Dylan16807 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less about what you do with the domain and more about the method of choosing the domain. If your domain is blatantly copying a company name, and it's not your company name, you're not in a strong position. By copying I mean something like paypa1.com, not something like paypalsucks.com. If you have a domain where you do nothing on it, but it's not copying anything either, that's squatting but nobody is going to c…

> If you hold a client's site hostage for not paying, yeah that sounds like squatting. // Am I supposed to give them product without receiving payment?

There's a reason I put the 'not a value judgement' comment. You have justification, but you are still doing it.

Re: 4chan demands 4chan.com domain name

#66

Post by Lambdanaut »

dsego wrote: post #56
Lambdanaut wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because you own something DOESN'T give you impunity to 'waste' it as you see fit Under US law you sure do. You also have to define "waste". The owners of 4chan.com are obviously holding onto their domain because they see it as a valuable asset. I doubt they'd see this as wasting their property. They're watching it grow in value. Your argument would virtually have us outlaw anyone from holding onto an asset if…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

Haha interesting side-case. Well, I will say that it certainly wasn't an example of Capitalism, and I don't condone something as silly as the illegality of owning a specific element like gold.

Re: 4chan demands 4chan.com domain name

#67

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #65
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you hold a client's site hostage for not paying, yeah that sounds like squatting. // Am I supposed to give them product without receiving payment?

There's a reason I put the 'not a value judgement' comment. You have justification, but you are still doing it .

Alright but if the definition of squatting doesn't help with the value judgement, ie some squatting is justified, then that's no great help towards deciding how to delineate allowable behaviour wrt domain holding, is it? I considered the purpose of the definition of squatting was to define behaviour which was considered unhelpful and was to be discouraged in some way.

Re: 4chan demands 4chan.com domain name

#68

Post by Shinkei »

nivla wrote: post #53
Shinkei wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the mean time, someone read about this big project and decides to built a mini mart called Main St. Shopping right around the corner Are you trying to stengthen my argument? You've just proven that they were doing the very thing I'm arguing is unethical. Now if they incidentally named their shopping plaza this name and they can prove it was coincidence... well then we have an argument. As for Google.io, they DO h…

>Are you trying to stengthen my argument? You've just proven that they were doing the very thing I'm arguing is unethical. No, the point is you are trying to use emotions to determine the "good" guy from the "bad" guy, which is not as black and white as it seems. On the same issue: 4chan.com was created on "12/13/03" where as 4chan.org was created on "2004-02-14". Now you can't say just because 4chan.org is popular,…

>Yes this worked out so well which is why our laws are based on vagueness.

Actually this is a common thing in Law. Many times we can't objectively define something, but 'most' people know it when they see it. Some examples you should look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prima_facie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Res_ipsa_loquitur

It is a mark of our intelligence as humans that we can rapidly integrate the available knowledge and render judgement--at least tacitly.

Re: 4chan demands 4chan.com domain name

#69

Post by doomrobo »

Lambdanaut wrote: post #52
Shinkei wrote: post #24

Let's say I run a town with shopping centers. Both are called Main Street Shopping but one is located on Main St and 1st and the other is located at Main St and 120th. When you show up at Main St and 1st, is it a bussling shopping center filled with stores of all kinds. When you GPS Main Street Shopping Center and accidentally arrive at the other location, you just find a parking lot with an empty field with a "comin…

> Just because you own something DOESN'T give you impunity to 'waste' it as you see fit Under US law you sure do. You also have to define "waste". The owners of 4chan.com are obviously holding onto their domain because they see it as a valuable asset. I doubt they'd see this as wasting their property. They're watching it grow in value. Your argument would virtually have us outlaw anyone from holding onto an asset if…

*hoard

I actually just found out that it's a homophone with horde (I thought they were spelled the same and had different meanings).

Re: 4chan demands 4chan.com domain name

#70

Post by nness »

Shinkei wrote: post #48
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because you own something DOESN'T give you impunity to 'waste' it as you see fit. // Sure it does. IF you own it. > These are greedy people just speculatively buying stuff without any real interest. // This is capitalism. The more damaging domain as you suggest is real-estate. Online the problem becomes simply "oh example.com wasn't right, example.org ... oh, ya, there it is". That might be a very minor annoya…

>if you have a swimming pool and aren't using it as much as the public feel you should that it can be confiscated. Or, say, you have 2 cars - well clearly you can't drive both at once; repossession by the state, et cetera This has nothing to do with what I said. Neither a swimming pool nor a car is a scarce resource. Now if you owned the only bridge to an island and didn't allow people to use it, or charged them exto…

Economically speaking, everything is a scare resource. But more importantly, a unused domain does not cause any damage, as say a derelict house would. I don't find the metaphors compatible.
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