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By Valerie S. Johnson
When a national or international tragedy occurs, such as the recent shootings on the Virginia Tech campus, people are moved to action. Web sites for tributes and for receiving charitable donations to benefit the victims and their families quickly pop up on the Internet.
According to an Associated Press report, a Phoenix man was motivated partially by his anti-gun stance and partially by profit when he registered numerous domain names including CampusKillings.com, VirginiaTechMurders.com, and SlaughterInVirginia.com. What’s worse is that this was not an isolated incident, as he was not the only person who rushed to register domain names related to the tragic event for under $10 and then offer them for sale for thousands of dollars.
You may think that some laws somewhere would or should prohibit this practice. The dispute resolution policies of ICANN, the Internet’s watchdog organization, and federal U.S. laws, do protect trademark owners from cybersquatters. As an ordinary citizen, you can’t register the domain name Coke.com and then try to hold the beverage company to ransom. The campus shooting spree isn’t protected because no trademarks are involved. However, it is undeniably morally offensive to seek to profit from the misery of others. Fortunately, some of the domain registration services shut down some of these sites based on their own policies against offensive domain names.
The full AP story is available here.
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When a national or international tragedy occurs, such as the recent shootings on the Virginia Tech campus, people are moved to action. Web sites for tributes and for receiving charitable donations to benefit the victims and their families quickly pop up on the Internet.
According to an Associated Press report, a Phoenix man was motivated partially by his anti-gun stance and partially by profit when he registered numerous domain names including CampusKillings.com, VirginiaTechMurders.com, and SlaughterInVirginia.com. What’s worse is that this was not an isolated incident, as he was not the only person who rushed to register domain names related to the tragic event for under $10 and then offer them for sale for thousands of dollars.
You may think that some laws somewhere would or should prohibit this practice. The dispute resolution policies of ICANN, the Internet’s watchdog organization, and federal U.S. laws, do protect trademark owners from cybersquatters. As an ordinary citizen, you can’t register the domain name Coke.com and then try to hold the beverage company to ransom. The campus shooting spree isn’t protected because no trademarks are involved. However, it is undeniably morally offensive to seek to profit from the misery of others. Fortunately, some of the domain registration services shut down some of these sites based on their own policies against offensive domain names.
The full AP story is available here.
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