Posted on 08/20/2011 9:43:55 AM PDT by SanFranDan
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has always known how to use sexual imagery to advance its political agenda.
According to Reuters, the animal rights group is planning on taking this further by actually launching a pornographic website:
In preparation for a new triple-x Internet domain that will launch in December, lawyers for the most storied brands in the United States are scrambling to prevent an x-rated rip-off of an invaluable asset: corporate Web addresses.
The domain operator administering the .xxx domain is accepting early applications from brand owners who want control over their names. ICM Registry says it has received over 900,000 "expressions of interest" from companies that want to preregister their trademarks or block others from snapping them up to create, say, a Barbie.xxx or Coke.xxx. [...]
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals also signed up. However, instead of blocking its name, said PETA spokeswoman Lindsay Rajt, the organization will launch peta.xxx as a pornography site that draws attention to the plight of animals.
Not surprisingly, the folks at the Huffington Post were very excited by this:
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...
> There is no requirement whatsoever that porn sites be restricted to .xxx domains. As such, most porn sites will continue on unchanged at their present .com addresses.
Correct, all the existing ".com" porn sites will continue unchanged.
The ORIGINAL (misguided) proposal for a ".xxx" domain was to REQUIRE porn sites to move over to it, abandoning their ".com" sites. They could still own the ".com" domain, but they couldn't post material on the ".com" site other than a redirect to the ".xxx" site, which could then be filtered.
In theory this could allow for content filtering to "protect the children". Anti-porn advocates were thrilled and lined up to support the proposal. But of course, the proposal immediately ran into the predictable trouble on the definition of "porn" even within the USA, and the larger fact that the internet is international and countries do not agree AT ALL on what is and is not porn. Do you want your viewing controlled by an Islamic cleric?
So the proposal had to be modified to drop the REQUIREMENT and merely make ".xxx" voluntary. So to speak.
Then it became manifestly clear that this ".xxx" domain proposal was in reality a monetary shakedown on EVERY EXISTING DOMAIN, porn and non-porn, every business and individual domain, pure and simple. See my comment #29 above for the story on that aspect.
Yes, *after* the damage has been done. And good luck with 'making whole' from some fly-by-night operation. Trademark owners will be forced to spend big bucks to make the nuisance go away. Only the legal profession will profit from this.
This is the type of scenario that makes one go, "Damn! Why didn't I think of that!"
And it was all for the children... LOL!
concur.
Perverts for the Erotic Treatment of Animals
Much better!
Actually, if ICANN is trafficking in Moltke.xxx then ICANN is your defendant. Don’t care what their disclaimers say.
Yes and no (mostly No, I’m afraid).
You can get ICANN to block and remove the contested .xxx domain.
But ICANN is NOT responsible for any damage-causing or illegal content published at such a domain (think ‘kiddy porn’). Even the webhosting companies that store the content on their servers are not. Otherwise there would be no more ICANN (or ATT, or Comcast, or...) today.
Damaging (or illegal) content is the responsibility of the domain owner. Who is the one that must be sued for damages. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is, and - for practical reasons - rightly so. (Or would you expect ICANN et al to scourge through millions and millions of websites (every day!) to make sure that there is not one shred of damaging/illegal content published? How could they possibly do this?)
well, icann or not, anyone who profits from libel is liable, to some degree.
No lawyer (thank God) but would posit that a case could be made...in a just world. But perhaps not in this one.
Assigning a domain name is not ‘libel’ (or, as such, even trademark infringement - a trademark only covers specific goods and/or services, and a domain name is neither under any legal system), and ICANN does not profit from any content posted on such domains. Let’s leave it at that.
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