The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a bill that would increase jail time for identity thieves and other fraudulent Web users who register sites under false identities.The bill, which passed by voice vote, would not directly outlaw the use of fraudulent registration information. Rather, it would increase by up to seven years the prison terms of those convicted of felonies.
Reuters [reuters.com] reported about a new bill (H.R.3632 [thomas.loc.gov]) that the House Of Representatives has passed that would add up to a 7 year penalty to people who were caught doing fraudulent activity on their domains, when they used fake whois information.
The Senate has not passed their version (S.02242 [thomas.loc.gov])
I think the scariest part of this whole thing is what is classified as fraudulent activity. Obviously email scams, credit card scams etc, but I am wondering at what point affiliate sites with "automated link building" will fall into this category.
Fake whois information drives me crazy, and anything to discourage it is generally a good thing.
And that includes affiliate sites and automated link building schemes. Transparency is the best disinfectant.
Why? What business is it of yours?
Why? What business is it of yours?
It is my business when a site has ripped off content, cloaked my site, or used other means to steal from me. This has happened several times and looking up John Doe stuff in whois is totally useless.
If someone is going to publish a public website, info on their true identity should be available through the courts to ascertain the actual owners of the site. Letting people fill in John Doe stuff defeats this purpose, whether they want their info hidden or not is not the point.
Quite frankly, I am apalled that companies like netsol do not have some sort of checks in place to see if a phone number or address is correct. You would be amazed at the amount of false data that resides in their database, not to mention the amount of redundant data.
Just my 2 cents.
Other than that, they're just like any other registrar: ICANN can inform them of any domain name
bearing false WHOIS records and they'd act upon it.
I seemed to have touched a nerve here. Obviously the U.S. House of Representatives disagrees with you. Of course you have nothing to worry about if you never get convicted of a felony as a result of your website. But if you do, and you are found to have registered your site under false identities, may as well just add another seven years to your sentence.
In the meantime, until it's comprehensive and works, I'll skirt it feeling both morally and legally comfortable for the moment.
P.S. Felonies? Jesus, guys, I'm sure there are SOME of you out there but isn't it easy enough without that? And WERTY: Damn, man, you're outta luck. Automated link building WAS just recently declared a felony. Hey, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not really out to - awwwwwww, forget it.
How can we contact the domain owner if they we can't figure out who and where they are?
Get the IP and run it through an ARIN search, find who owns the IP block and contact them. I actually had this done. The whois might be fake, but the ARIN info is usually accurate. You are registered there if you own or rent an IP block. It not only shows the Class C block, but will give you a hierachy of the blocks above them (Class B at least). That way you can find out who is renting the IP.
Of course, getting foreign IPs is a bit different and they may not cooperate, it is strictly up to their laws. But here in the US, the IPs basically boil down to the phone companies, and believe me, they know who is renting what.
[edited by: webdude at 4:44 pm (utc) on Sep. 24, 2004]
If law enforcement needs to contact me, all they have to do is call my host. I'm not trying to hide my identity; I'm protecting my family's privacy.
Until then, we'll just have to either work with it or work around it with what we've got.
How effective that law can be is an issue I wonder about. Will it really be a deterrent to identity thieves? I doubt it. But it is nice to know there is a bigger book to throw at an offender.
The web is such a nightmare of phishing schemes for the naive. But I'd be very surprised if this law alone will make a practical difference.
Until then, you get to keep your corporations and your layers of legal paperwork that only an Federal Beaureau could decipher, and I get to keep my misleading whois.
Riddle Me this: Are most lawsuits settled out of court or tried? It's always setled because it costs too much.
This garbage is just more of the same BIG MONEY against the little guy. You said it yourself - you find an *alleged* infringer, and it is easy for your lawyers to send a letter. Bummer for you when it doesn't work so easily. I wonder how many times you have discovered concurrent creations? Tracked sources of inspiration for creative works? Verified contemporaneous notes to confirm the claims of your own writers? Tracked a work to it's true, prime source?
Of course you haven't... because you have been able to bully the little guy with your system - every time. And now you are complaining because it is not easy.
Legislate against fraud, but until you can PROVE intent keep the bullies under control or yu'll kil the innovation they feed off.
Time to go write my congressmen and representatives again. Looks like more garbage needs clarifying.
No.
Transparency is good for the Internet. Ownership of a domain is always temporary and is issued as a public trust.
Take ownership of land. You can go to the county tax office and look up who owns everything. There’s no anonymous ownership. Why should domains be different?
2) The need for transparency is greater than ever with the advance of the phenomenon that has contributed to the general degradation of the web in the last year: Google’s AdSense program.
Before AdSense, plagiarism of my clients’ sites happened occasionally; after AdSense it is much, much more frequent, and most of the time on sites which run AdSense. Google plays dumb agnostic: they won’t get involved when you tell them one of the AdSense sites is plagiarizing. They advise the parties to work it out among themselves. The copyright owner is forced to pursue the offending party. And it should not require any substantial effort to find out who owns a domain. You shouldn’t have to look up IP addresses or anything so remotely technical. Complete novices should be able to find out who owns what with a simple browser.
I’d be willing to give up my demand for openness if Google AdSense would disappear. But that’s not going to happen.
3) In the future search engines may (one hopes) be able to evaluate who owns domains and thus defeat attempts to build networks made to look like disparate sites that naturally link to each other. Better search results is another reason to require honesty.
4) In the schools kids are taught how to critically approach the Internet. Don’t believe everything you read on the web, the teachers tell them. To evaluate the source of these websites, kids (citizens) need to be able to find out who owns them.
Ownership of a domain is always temporary and is issued as a public trust.
Last I looked there was no such public trust designation nor legislation. In practice, it also doesn't appear to be managed as a public resource by any stretch of the imagination, especially if you consider it globally. I said give me fairness and I'll give transparency - it applies to ICAN/IANA as well.
Take ownership of land. You can go to the county tax office and look up who owns everything. There’s no anonymous ownership. Why should domains be different?
How about because they are not property? Not subject to taxation? Don't consume the public resources? Don't by existence impact another's right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?
Domains are not yet owned.. they are controlled, but even that has been successfully attacked in the system and "owners" stripped of their domains. Last I checked there was no case law on domain name ownership as property ownership; no real legal clarity for sale of domain names. Liability has followed the operators, as I suppose is proper, but we are very far from property laws applying to domains. At best we can be assured we have a contract for the term of paid registration, but even that is subject to vague and variable policies of registars, and also subject to political will. Take a close look at the intimidation and coercive practices of the RIAA in shutting down alleged copyright infringers...a world ruled by such intimidation and economic coercion, through uncontested unilateral claims backed by threat of significant legal burden, is far worse than one which requires you to expend effort to process claims.
The need for transparency is greater than ever with the advance of the phenomenon that has contributed to the general degradation of the web in the last year: Google’s AdSense program.
It may be best to keep personal opinion out of factual argument.
There are always those who seek protectionist legislation to protect the status quo, for commercial gain. It blocks innovation and progress, and serves as a feeble attempt to put off the inevitable. If you want to stay in business you need to keep up. Yes, that can be hard.
The copyright owner is forced to pursue the offending party.
That is "alleged" offending party. Would you prefer presumed guilty until proven innocent?
it should not require any substantial effort to find out who owns a domain. You shouldn’t have to look up IP addresses or anything so remotely technical. Complete novices should be able to find out who owns what with a simple browser.
Nonsense. We have to pay lawyers to write letters for us, lawyers to submit papers to the court, lawyers to answer complaints -- even lawyers to purchase real estate or check titles or secure our own rights in traffic court. All things we should be able to do for ourselves, right? So you have to pay a technologist to resolve your IPs.. nothing new here. Most technologists I know charge less than $250 per hour that lawyers charge.
The harder it is to determine the "owner" the less likely you are to attempt to intimidate and bully, and the more you will have to be sure you are correct before you pursue legal actions. That is all very, very good. It can all be determined - it will just cost money, as it does to answer your letters claiming infringement.
In the future search engines may (one hopes) be able to evaluate who owns domains and thus defeat attempts to build networks made to look like disparate sites that naturally link to each other. Better search results is another reason to require honesty.
More opinion... and it sounds like you assume the SEs always do things well and with integrity. To a business (like a search engine) search will be as good as it has to be to excel over competition.. and not much better. As soon as you are "transparent" they will take advantage of that as well, for commercial gain. It already seems that Google would like to ban all proxied domains as spam - if the use of proxies hadn't grown as fast as it did I would not have been surprised to see them do that as a psuedo-monopolistic tactic. If everyone got the messge that proxied domains didn't get indexed in Google, at a time when Google handled 80% of search, nobody would have proxied. Thankfully we all moved too quickly for that.
To evaluate the source of these websites, kids (citizens) need to be able to find out who owns them.
They need to be smarter than that, for sure. Do kids kow who owns MTV? Nickelodeon? Ugio? Can they find out without a lawyer or with a simple browser?
I want "joe surfer" to know who I am .."don't be silly"
This is a real problem, and needs to be addressed, I don't care how it's addressed, but it's pain to have to deal with, it means I have to dump my email addresses every year or two. Godaddy is by far and away the worst I've seen in this regard, by the way, about 1 week after I made a new domain with a new email address, I started getting spam on that email address. Obviously I'm not using godaddy anymore, but it still shows the problem.
One client had a problem with a stalking ex husband, this was a serious issue, we couldn't put her real name down or he could have found her, until some kind of security and privacy features are enabled these kinds of realworld issues can't be ignored, I'm not going to jeopardize my clients life just to satisfy some poorly and incompletely drafted legistlation that will have no affect on criminals anyway, since they don't care about stuff like that. I have no problem with requiring that the real name be available at some point, for example when it's a legal case, following due process and all that quaint stuff, sort of like how unlisted telephone numbers work.
What YOU register is MY business..because of sending spam ,because turning typo names into porn or selling blackmarket goods or running your little jhad behind a domain.. These are all reasons why registion info should be legal contact info
By not making the info legal we are enabling peope to commit frud , to direct your children to porn to sell you bogus goods etc..without even the slightest chance of being pursued by any normal citizen.
All countries that look out for their citizens require auto registrations , Home ownership and business ownership to be public information.. so that everyone is accountable by law for any injustices they may be accused of , for legal taxation purposes and so the public can review who it is they are dealing with .
Domain ownership gives a person a huge amount of power... at your finger tips you have the power to not only do normal daily buisiness but also the instant power to steal, to harm children and the public and even to terrorize.. to think that know one has a right to know who the registrant of any particular domain is ludicrous...
But for now you are safe because this law has no teeth.. what it will take is an abuse ,an outrage ,a terror developed behind the aninomity of a false registration that a real law will come bearing down that will automatically require the DELETION of all domains without proper registration contact....
Even then it wont stop those truely bent on destructive or criminal activities BUT it will stop the MASS of criminal activity that comes from uneducated theives and spammers. the typical moron that sets up a website selling computers (but never delivers)then takes the money after a few orders closes down and re-opens on another domain.. or the idiot spammer that thinks that it's ok to send out ten thosand or so spam emails a day while hiding behind a false domain registration.. these are the types of individuals that if they HAVE to include (and pay the extra $5 whatever for verification) everytime they register a domain..well these tens of thosands of idiots that cause the majority of spam and petty thievery (unless you are the one being ripped off) will forthe MOST part be stopped in their tracks because they areforthe most part not bright enough to figure out ways around the registration (that will identify them )
Most spam now is being sent through zombie pc's, I think the numbers are around 40-60% of total.
Porn operators are always on the cutting edge of the rules, they will do what they need to do to stay in business.
this is a local law, you can get around it by registering with a foreign registrar, these things are so easy to get around it's not even funny, that's why this is a pointless piece of legal paper.
Not liking porn site operators, spammers, etc, is understandable, but those are the people who could care less about this type of stuff, these kinds of laws don't protect anyone, they just create the illusion of action, typical washington when it comes to tech stuff.
