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registrars Domain Registrar liable for Pirate Site

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Domain Registrar Can be Held Liable for Pirate Site, Court Rules

in September 2013, H33T.com, one of the Internet’s most-visited torrent sites at the time, disappeared from the web .

Although the downtime was initially shrouded in mystery, it later became clear that the site had been targeted in a copyright infringement action.....

This is a game changer
https://www.husham.com/domain-registrar-can-be-held-liable-for-pirate-site-court-rules/

@Epik.com & @Rob Monster might be a bit worried about this one with www.gab.com moving on to their servers.

Discuss below...
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
That's useless law! IMO

Why should registrar be held liable for something a registrant does on their domain name? How can a registrar keep tab on the content of each domain name being registered with them?
 
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We actually tweeted about this case:

https://twitter.com/EpikDotCom/status/1077191186723627008

This looks like an idiotic decision by a German regional court that impacts German registrars. It should lose in Federal appeal. Alternatively, Germany signed the death warrant for all German registrars.

That said, perhaps Frau Merkel is ok with that given her recent record of stupid legislative decisions that erode national sovereignty.
 
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@MapleDots - I hadn't even thought of gab.com as a pirate site. Is it?
 
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Pirate Site?
(Not a simple topic)
If you go back to the time of (for example) Shakespeare:

""By our standards, Shakespeare was an intellectual property pirate. He took his plots and characters from other writers for free. (He didn’t pay the author of “Romeus and Juliet.”) He routinely cribbed passages, sometimes nearly word for word, from other books.

“King Lear” borrows from an older play, and a history book, and...
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/opinion/l22copyright.html

````
Intellectual property (IP) is a category worthy of on-going debate, IMO:

On one hand (supporting laws and restrictions) software developers have a right to protect their inventions (?), and can you imagine a World where 5,000 movie studios are all allowed to release the next "Star Wars" movie?

On the other hand, at the time of Shakespeare, to sometimes copy "nearly word for word, from other books" was not a crime. The goal was to improve on the works of others and it was assumed you were borrowing from the past / "standing on the shoulders" of previous giants.​

FYI: I am partially quoting from a book I read at a library and I haven't rediscovered the title/author. He won't mind... :)
 
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@MapleDots - I hadn't even thought of gab.com as a pirate site. Is it?

Sorry @stub , I did not ignore you but I'm trying to limit my posts because too many of my topics are trending right now and I want some of them to fall off the top list. I don't want this topic to trend because it will look like my topics are the only ones trending. That may peeve off some members and I prefer to avoid this.

That said....

Gab.com is not a pirate site but I will guarantee that someone with a chip on their shoulder will want to place it in a similar registrar restricted category. That would be a slippery slope for free speech and would eventually put even websites like namepros at risk. Imagine if someone posted something and another member found it offensive. Imagine if the posting was made to evoke a conversation but one business or entity deemed it offensive. Now imagine if namepros sided with the poster and said the post was instrumental to the conversation.

Now imagine the company giving a demand to the registrar of namepros to take down the domain. Remember we are not even talking about approaching the company that would be hosting the website for namepros, we are talking about them side stepping even that and taking the website down at the registrar level.

@Epik.com is completely correct in standing up to this. It is not about supporting a site like Gab.com it is about supporting the right for all domain holders to have access to a registrar without fear of another entity demanding removal of the domain.

Pirate sites? - It may start there but ultimately if we allow the domains to be removed there is a real possibility this will spread to other domains like GAB.com and that would be a disaster for the entire world wide web.

We simply cannot stand by while the rights of a few are taking away the rights of the many.

So the reason I singled out Epik is because @Rob Monster is indeed a very controversial figure. On one hand he is a crusader and on the other hand he is a business man defending the viability of his company. Personally I chose to remove any of the personal issues people have brought into that entire saga, instead I look at the outcome of a company like GoDaddy dropping a registered domain because of their personal beliefs and how that could affect the industry as a whole.

PS. Now if this topic starts to trend I am in trouble :wideyed:
 
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One last point....

Imagine owning a million dollar domain and if you could not get a registrar to host it for you because another entity finds it offensive or claims they have a copyright on a specific dictionary word. There are only so many words and letters in languages and we have to use common sense before we place restrictions.

We simply cannot start the slide down that slope, eventually that could affect the fortunes of all domainers.

I predict that Europe is going to be in big trouble in the future, they are passing too many privacy laws and in they end that is going to strangle business and cause a great recession. There is a fine line of privacy and commerce, we want to make sure we don't take away privacy but we also want to make sure we don't overdo it to the point that it strangles business and eliminates jobs.

Common sense seems to be in short supply when it comes to lawmakers in Europe nowadays.
 
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The Higher Regional Court of Saarbrücken concluded Key-Systems can be held secondarily liable for the infringing actions of a customer if it fails to take action if rightsholders point out “obvious” copyright infringing activity online.

This means that, if a site owner is unresponsive to takedown requests, Key-Systems and other registrars can be required to take a domain name offline, even when the infringing activity is limited to a single page.
Strictly nothing new here, registrars can be held liable just like webhosts.
 
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For info, nearly ten years ago but still relevant: hundreds of .co.uk names were frozen by police and Nominet.uk due to criminal use:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8392600.stm

More than 1,200 websites that claim to sell cut-price designer goods have been shut down in the biggest police operation of its kind in the UK.

The 1,219 sites, which advertise brands including Ugg boots, Tiffany jewellery and Links of London, were removed by the Metropolitan Police.

Customers who buy from the sites either receive nothing, counterfeit goods, or have their credit card details stolen.

Criminal gangs in Asia are believed to make millions of pounds from the fraud.

Officers from the Met's central e-crime unit, working with the body responsible for domain names in the UK, Nominet, removed the websites, which included Australiaugg4shop.co.uk, hotlinksshop.co.uk and etiffany-shop.co.uk

Nick Wenban-Smith, senior counsel for Nominet, which manages more than seven million UK domain names, said the sites had effectively been frozen, and could not be re-registered or recycled.

"It's a fantastic result for UK consumers, Nominet's mission is to make the internet a safe and more trusted place, and the UK jurisdiction has an excellent reputation.

"This is just one more example of our efforts to preserve that position," he said.

Consumer Direct, Trading Standards, the Office of Fair Trading and manufacturers also helped identify the fraudulent web sites.
 
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How can a registrar keep tab on the content of each domain name being registered with them?

That's not what the reasoning of the decision requires.

"The Higher Regional Court of Saarbrücken concluded Key-Systems can be held secondarily liable for the infringing actions of a customer if it fails to take action if rightsholders point out “obvious” copyright infringing activity online.

This means that, if a site owner is unresponsive to takedown requests, Key-Systems and other registrars can be required to take a domain name offline, even when the infringing activity is limited to a single page."

That's much like the way the DMCA operates in the US.

That said, perhaps Frau Merkel is ok with that

What does Merkel have to do with it? I realize that certain types of people think that the government should operate like a dictatorship in which the executive authority has command over the courts, but most Western democracies don't operate that way.
 
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"The Higher Regional Court of Saarbrücken concluded Key-Systems can be held secondarily liable for the infringing actions of a customer if it fails to take action if rightsholders point out “obvious” copyright infringing activity online.

This explains everything, thank you John! :)
 
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Are your "pirate sites" a trending topic yet? :)
 
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That's useless law! IMO

Why should registrar be held liable for something a registrant does on their domain name? How can a registrar keep tab on the content of each domain name being registered with them?
Going out on a limb here and I believe it has to be they are held accountable after they have been notified of nefarious activity on the domain and then choose to do nothing about it.
 
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In .com or .ca?

HaHa... crap

I meant figuratively.... as in I will use it in a sentence 3 times and make the word my own :xf.cool:

I re read my post and I can see how one could think I meant the domain.

That would have been sweet though (y)
 
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Yep :) I thought you had been overcome by a brainwave.
 
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