At 4/11/04 12:18 PM, Ben Kennedy wrote:
>Well, true. I guess I didn't realise the discussion here had to do with
>forcing litigation on domain holders. I thought the issue was one of
>accessibility (how to get in touch with them).
Right... I was just trying to cover classes of people who are commonly
cited as having a right to know the owner's direct contact information,
even if it's otherwise private. Intellectual property lawyers are one of
those commonly cited classes.
Roger asked why I would be so hungry to send a DMCA complaint instead of
use a phone call: he appears to have misunderstood, because I don't want
to send any DMCA complaints. IP lawyers do, though, so I was merely
pre-answering the oft-heard objection of "the valuable work of IP
lawyers, those princes among men, would grind to a halt without WHOIS!"
My point was merely that, with the aid of DMCA and other ISP-threatening
tactics in other countries, IP lawyers are usually successful even in
cases of invalid WHOIS, so that particular example can't really be used
as a reason why WHOIS must be kept at all costs.
Roger's actual point was probably more along the lines of "regardless of
what IP lawyers want, *I* like to resolve complaints with a phone call,
and WHOIS makes that easy for me". This is true, and I'm sympathetic to
that argument. However, in the end I believe that Roger's right to pull
up the direct phone number of a domain owner (instead of just an ISP or
other responsible agent) is nowhere near as strong as the right of domain
owners to privacy from salespeople, murderers, Domain Registry of
America, etc. I realize this is a matter of opinion and some here
disagree, but I've talked to a lot of domain owners about this, and most
of them share my opinion. Anyone on this list arguing against privacy for
WHOIS is arguing against the overwhelming desire of their paying
customers.
Anyway, I predict that within a few years, this problem will go away by
itself. Many have mentioned that they already provide the equivalent of
private registrations, and my company does the same: The postal address
and phone number listed in WHOIS for our new customers is replaced with
our own, and the e-mail address is simply a forwarding address that we
change from time to time to stop spammers. It doesn't violate the policy
on accurate contact data because it's all perfectly valid contact
information for the registrant -- any important communication we receive
reaches the registrant, whether it's a threatening letter from a lawyer
or Roger's polite phone message. The registrants agree to this and can
choose to have non-obfuscated contact info displayed if they wish
(although not a single customer has chosen that -- while only 7% of
customers may be willing to pay extra for WHOIS privacy, close to 100% of
them appear to want it when it's free).
So my customers, and the customers of some other resellers who have
spoken up in this thread, already have what I'm advocating anyway. It's
too bad it comes down to this kind of "do it yourself privacy", though,
because some registrars and resellers will probably do it in a way that
causes problems for registrants. I'd much prefer it to simply be done at
the registry level, or by registrars directly in the case of resellers;
although this seems unlikely today, I believe that registrants will come
to simply expect it and avoid companies that don't obfuscate the
registrant's personal information, forcing everyone to do it or lose
market share. (But then again, I believe a lot of things about the future
that turn out not to happen, so....)
-- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies http://www.tigertech.net/"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." -- Darwin
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