[IP] more on GOOD QUESTION why hasnt the FTC or DOJ enjoined Site Finder already under ACPA?
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 16:35:11 -0500
From: "Stewart, William C (Bill), RTSLS" <billstewart@xxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [IP] GOOD QUESTION why hasnt the FTC or DOJ enjoined Site Finder
already under ACPA?
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx, ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Paul Foldes asks why the FTC or DOJ hasn't already enjoined
Site Finder under the ACPA.
As somebody who's not a trademark lawyer, and doesn't like Site Finder,
my reading of this is that it's pretty unlikely to violate that law,
certainly not to the extent that they should have already enjoined them.
Also, the web interface doesn't do anything much different from
what Microsoft Internet Explorer defaults to doing for
nonexistent domain names, though the implementation is different.
The two main things the law covers are people
misusing domain names that do exist, and
people misusing domain names that don't exist but are easily confused
with well-known trademarks, particularly with the intent of
extracting money from the trademark owners.
SiteFinder doesn't misuse domain names that do exist -
for those, DNS works fine (at least to its usual level of accuracy.)
For domain names that don't exist, the email side rejects the connection
with an error message that says that the incorrect recipient name does not
exist,
and the web side returns a web page saying that the domain name
you asked for does not exist, suggests several names that
might be what you were looking for, and asks if you'd like to do a search.
This does not strike me as something likely to lead to confusion.
(Annoyance, perhaps, but confusion, no.)
For example, several misspellings and variations on
www.cocacola.com, such as www.c0cac0la.com and www.cocacola1.com,
are already taken (and might be confusing), but www.cocacola-does-not-exist.com
gets Verisign's web page saying that the address you're looking for
does not exist, and though it doesn't suggest trying "www.cocacola.com",
it does helpfully suggest trying "www.does-not-exist.com" and
"www.does-not-exist.net".
If they were to start charging for fuzzy matches to well-known domain names,
it might be a different situation that deserved examination,
but I don't see this as confusing to the average use.
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@xxxxxxxxx
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