Free Republic

A student in Paris has bought several domain names linked to far-right news website Breitbart in the hopes of blocking it from opening in France, according to reports. Breitbart — the anti-immigration, anti-EU, anti-establishment US news site that supported Donald Trump — said in November that it planned to launch in France with one job in mind: to help get Marine Le Pen elected president. […] The student, named Antonin by The Verge news site, bought the domain names breitbart.fr, breitbartnews.fr, and breitbartnewsnetwork.fr in a bid to block the French launch. …

Sarah Palin will need to shell out some cash if she wants youbetcha2012.com on yard signs during the next presidential campaign. Or, for that matter, sarah2012.com, spalin2012.com, or mamabear2012. It doesn't matter that the next presidential election is a year away and the list of contenders is foggy at best. A healthy market has cropped up for Palin URLs in anticipation of her potential run. The site names have been gobbled up by domain name squatters who want to profit on the resale or who want to use the real estate to politick on their own. For potential candidate...

NEW YORK - It's not often you can compare Internet addresses with clothing, but a growing practice comes close, contributing to a global shortage in good names. Entrepreneurs have been taking advantage of a five-day grace period to sample millions of domain names, keeping the relative few that might generate advertising revenues and dropping the rest before paying. It's akin to buying new clothes on a charge card only to return them for a full refund after wearing them to a big party.The grace period was originally designed to rectify legitimate mistakes, such as registrants mistyping the domain name they...

SAN DIEGO – An ex-Rancho Santa Fe man sought for failing to appear in court after a $65 million judgement was entered against him in a pornographic Web site dispute was ordered today to be extradited to San Jose. Stephen Michael Cohen, 57, had been living in Tijuana and was reportedly arrested yesterday by Mexican authorities when he tried to apply for a work permit. He was turned over to U.S. officials, who had an arrest warrant signed by a San Jose judge, and taken to San Diego. In San Diego, U.S. Magistrate Judge Leo Papas was poised to set...

For those of you who are interested, left-wing groups registering domain names such as www.bush2004.com, www.bush2004.org, georgewbush.org, etc. are clearly violating the Lanham Act, i.e federal trademark law. The pertinent law reads as follows: 15 USCS § 1129 (2004) § 1129. Cyberpiracy protections for individuals (1) In general. (A) Civil liability. Any person who registers a domain name that consists of the name of another living person, or a name substantially and confusingly similar thereto, without that person's consent, with the specific intent to profit from such name by selling the domain name for financial gain to that person or...

Judge Rejects Bid To Shut Down Web Site in Congressional Race Greenbelt, Md. (AP) - A federal judge has handed a setback to a congressional candidate from Montgomery County (website - news) who's upset his name is being used in the address for a Web site supporting his opponent. The judge Thursday refused to shut down the Web site. Republican candidate Robin Ficker claims he ought to have first rights to www.robinficker.com. Instead, a consultant for his GOP primary opponent, Charles Floyd, is using the Web address for a site with unflattering information about Ficker. The judge ruled that...

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s American Spectator is back. But you may have trouble finding it online. Type in americanspectator.org, and you find yourself at a completely different publication: Patrick Buchanan's The American Conservative. To find Mr. Tyrrell's magazine, you must go to spectator.org. What's up with that? Explaining why he founded The American Conservative two and a half years ago, Patrick Buchanan told The New York Times on September 9, 2002: "We need to recapture the conservative movement. The movement has been hijacked and turned into a globalist, interventionist, open-borders ideology, which is not the conservative movement I grew up...

In a victory for cybersquatters and others who snatch up domain names containing personal monikers, a dispute-resolution board has refused to turn over Web addresses containing the words "Kathleen Kennedy Townsend." Townsend, Maryland's lieutenant governor and a potential candidate for governor this year, discovered that a Baltimore man had registered several Web addresses with her name, including kennedytownsend.org and kathleenkennedytownsend.com. Townsend argued that she has a trademark on her name and asked the World Intellectual Property Organization's Arbitration and Mediation Center--one of the groups charged with settling domain-name disputes--to transfer the addresses to her. However, the owner of the disputed...