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I bought netflix.soy

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Re: I bought netflix.soy

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone unfamiliar, this is a clever riff on a classic economics joke about the Efficient Market Hypothesis [1]. "Two economists are walking down the street and one of them notices what appears to be a $20 bill (or a $100 bill—the monetary amounts vary) on the sidewalk. “It’s not a real $20 bill,” the other economist declares. “If it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up off the sidewalk already.”…

Except the $20 bill in this case is a $-10 bill (or whatever the domain name costs), as there is no profit to be made by registering a top company's trademark as a domain name.

Yup. It's more like lots of people were walking along and saw exactly what it was, and knew better than to touch it.

Re: I bought netflix.soy

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone unfamiliar, this is a clever riff on a classic economics joke about the Efficient Market Hypothesis [1]. "Two economists are walking down the street and one of them notices what appears to be a $20 bill (or a $100 bill—the monetary amounts vary) on the sidewalk. “It’s not a real $20 bill,” the other economist declares. “If it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up off the sidewalk already.”…

Except the $20 bill in this case is a $-10 bill (or whatever the domain name costs), as there is no profit to be made by registering a top company's trademark as a domain name.

Ha exactly — like a briefcase with $1million on the sidewalk. No way I’m touching that!

Re: I bought netflix.soy

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone unfamiliar, this is a clever riff on a classic economics joke about the Efficient Market Hypothesis [1]. "Two economists are walking down the street and one of them notices what appears to be a $20 bill (or a $100 bill—the monetary amounts vary) on the sidewalk. “It’s not a real $20 bill,” the other economist declares. “If it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up off the sidewalk already.”…

Except the $20 bill in this case is a $-10 bill (or whatever the domain name costs), as there is no profit to be made by registering a top company's trademark as a domain name.

While it is an unwinnable case, there is a positive dollar amount to settling out of court.

Re: I bought netflix.soy

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could someone register a tld and charge a crazy amount of money for it, to extort big companies?

No, they can use their trademark to take control of the domain without paying any money through UDRP.

That’s not how trademark law works, at least. Does the URDP really let trademark holders take down sites that are critical of them?

Re: I bought netflix.soy

#155

There's a terrible enterprise security product that can be configured by IT to quasi-MITM your company web traffic. Instead of relying on enterprises pushing their own trusted root certs and MITMing the whole session this terrible product redirects all traffic to (and I'm not kidding here) urls like "www.terriblesecuritycompanyname.com/www.originalurl.com" when the user accesses www.originalurl.com. So this "enterpri…

Wow, that sounds awful. Do you know what they did (assuming not nothing) to have browsers continue to enforce the same-origin policy, and block www.terriblesecuritycompanyname.com/evilhacker.com from accessing cookies that belong to www.terriblesecuritycompanyname.com/owa.office365.com?

I haven't looked into it that deeply to see how (whether) they're handling same origin or cookie access. I assume they're doing some kind of magic other than just rewriting the URLs.

If you haven't been involved with enterprise information security you'd be surprised by how intrusive and poorly conceived these services are in a lot of cases. Tavis Ormandy and others have famously found many AV products to be running un-sandboxed untrusted javascript in kernel mode. In line web proxies have been found to do things like sign untrusted or revoked certs with a trusted root cert.

It's all pretty much a big grift to capitalize on companies' rightful cyber security fears.

Re: I bought netflix.soy

#156
This is the first time in a couple years that I have seen a reference to myself while reading an article. Thanks for the surprise!

> No. They're welcome to have them back anytime they want. They could probably do it pretty forcibly if I refused to budge too (see Microsoft vs. MikeRoweSoft).

Re: I bought netflix.soy

#157
post #13

A Google domain name is lying on the ground. An IT guy walks past it. A friend asks: "Didn't you see the Google domain name there?" The IT guy replies: "I thought I saw something, but I must've imagined it. If there had been a Google domain on the ground, someone would've picked it up."

With the expansiion of TLDs, this just means that apex domains of a TLD will still be subject to trademarks. google.pizza, google.yoga, google.keyboard will all be trivially easy for Google to claim trademark infringement for. So while it's cute that you can register "google.soy" -- if Google cares enough they'll take if from you.

I don't doubt google would attempt to do this, and probably win simply by being able to out resource an individual who registered the domain, however, my limited understanding of trademark law is this wouldn't necessarily be a valid claim.

My understanding is trademarks are a protection against consumer confusion, so as long as companies aren't selling similar products or services, or competing in the same geography there isn't a problem. This is difficult with google, but a non-tech scuba company operating under google.scuba or googlescuba.com wouldn't necessarily infringe on google the tech company unless they're actively doing something to make consumer believe they're dealing with google the tech company.

Google is difficult with it's large breadth of interests, but for most tech companies this is likely more about exploiting flaws with the legal system by out resourcing opponents more than legitimate claims (thinking the oracles, salesforces, dells, Intels, etc).

Re: I bought netflix.soy

#158
I attempted to do this in the past on namecheap for an Amazon domain based out of some obscure African country (domain was showing as available). The domain order failed, presumably due to reasons similar to authors Gibraltar example. I messaged namecheap live-chat support to ask why, and they basically said "we don't know why it failed, but even if it went through, if Amazon asks us to transfer ownership to them we'd go ahead and revoke your ownership"...which is BS kowtowing in my opinion.

Re: I bought netflix.soy

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the $20 bill in this case is a $-10 bill (or whatever the domain name costs), as there is no profit to be made by registering a top company's trademark as a domain name.

While it is an unwinnable case, there is a positive dollar amount to settling out of court.

Especially if you have a cute story like the MikeRoweSoft guy did.

Re: I bought netflix.soy

#160
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and were registered and used in "bad faith". How were they registered in bad faith? He's not extorting money from netfilx, nor is he trying to deceive people into thinking he's neflix.

UDRP typically rules in favor of the holder of the unambiguous trademark in these kinds of cases. As an example, "Exxon Mobil" refers unambiguously to a single entity only, and has no other possible uses, so anyone registering exxonmobil.{anything} would lose if the company came after them. No one else has any right to that trademark, and ICANN enforces trademark rights on domains. If the trademark already existed wh…

What about .sucks? Couldn’t one claim free speech? https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2015/06/29/saga-of-suc...
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