On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, Steve Schear wrote:

Senator Lamar Smith of Texas - chairman of the Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee - yesterday produced from nowhere extensions to the 1946 Trademark Act that would make giving false contact information for a domain name a civil and criminal offence.

Does it apply only to domains registered through US companies? Does it apply to out-of-country people (eg. if I register a .com site in Europe, with false (or, better said, privacy-compliant) contact information, could I be jailed if I'd visit the USA, or be extradited there)? Does it apply to domains registered through a "trust", where the registering person is offshore, not a subject to US law, while the end user is merely the one to whose machines the A and MX records point to? What if the machines are also offshore, with just the services leased to their user? What about domain registrars of foreign countries, eg. Korea or Hong Kong? Due to the global nature of the Internet, this proposal has more holes than a pound of Swiss cheese and any technically minded person would laugh it off. Which, due to the nature of politicos, makes it more likely to pass.