On 6/13/13 8:23 PM, Seth M Reiss wrote:
I don't get it. Can you explain Eric?
Seth, Assume the assertions offered in the complaint are factual: a domain registered for the maximum allowed period to which no disclosed use was made, and some act by a third-party, and a consequent act by the registrar of record, the eventual loosing registrar, and a consequent act by another registrar of record, the eventual gaining registrar. The second half of the fact pattern existed when the domain panix.com, serving the dial-up and later broadband-independent users of the City of New York was briefly under the control of a third party in 2005 (if memory serves, I acted to notify Marty Hannigan, then of Verisign, and Bruce Tompkin, of Melbourne IT, the morning after I learned from Steven Bellovin that "panix was down"). Where there is substantive public use, the chain of custody of a name to address association is a public interest. Where there is not, as in the instant case, the chain of custody of a name to address association is not a public interest. Are there "more" labels with no address association, or an address association upon which no public reliance exists? Obviously, 63 octets taking on values from {a..z,0..9,-} with only the rule that "-" not begin or end or occur in two adjacent octets, the potential label set with no beneficial resolution properties is vast. So this can "get big", or be "wow", or "prove there is no law", but sharing, without benefit, the compulsion or speculation of registrants of labels with no published use detracts from the existing since the beginning of the shared registry system (to which I also participated) practice of allowing transfers between "competitive registrars" and ensuring that the interests of registrants of labels upon which public reliance is made take precedence over the interests of registrars. It is the existence of reliance which creates an interest in the stability and security of that reliance, not punters slapping $6 down on the outcome of roulette wheel over a generating set of alphanumerics plus a hyphen with conditions. I hope that helps. Eric