Seven years jail, $150,000 fine if you don't tell the world your email and home address

Thomas Shaddack shaddack at ns.arachne.cz
Sat Feb 7 21:07:34 PST 2004


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.





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