I've blogged previously about the Sitefinder crisis.
This morning at 6am California time, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced it was giving VeriSign 36 hours to turn off Sitefinder or else. I've got the basic info, and the key links, up at ICANNWatch under the title ICANN Throws Down the Gauntlet to VeriSign on Sitefinder.
Jennifer Granick of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society has just announced the publication of the first Packets newsletter designed “to provide the legal community with concise descriptions of recently decided cyberlaw-related cases, and to point to the original decisions.” The announcement says it will be a bi-monthly publication written by Stanford Law School students. Staff and fellows of the center and volunteer attorneys will be the editors. The first issue is already online. It looks like a good, and well-written, resource for students and for lawyers who are not immersed in the field, complete with links to the sources after the summaries. People wanting more news, more often, albeit even more summarized, will probably want to subscribe to Michael Geist's exhaustingly comprehensive free daily newsletter, BNA Internet Law News.
Predicting the outcome of lawsuits is a risky game. But I'm going to predict that this motion by SCO seeking to dismiss the declaratory judgment complaint filed against it by Red Hat will fail. Miserably. Unless of course SCO's lawyers were to promise the court that they would never bring a copyright infringement claim against Red Hat or any of its customers. That's highly unlikely, but it would certainly moot the case.
SCO is the company that has been running around claiming that Linux violates its intellectual property rights. While trumpeting this claim, and offering purported licenses to users of Linux, SCO has been unwilling to make public a single convincing example of infringing code. It seems pretty obvious that SCO's own actions create a live controversy sufficient to satisfy the Declaratory Judgment Act, 28 UCS § 2201. Furthermore, the suggestion that the case is somehow precluded by a related action involving SCO and IBM is not at all persuasive, especially as many of the issues in that case involve a contract to which only IBM was a party. SCO is represented by David Boise's firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner. So far, the paper in SCO's case and the client's general behavior are not making the Boise firm look good (yes, yes, I know some clients are beyond their lawyers' control….). Usually top-quality firms have aces up their sleeves before filing stuff like this motion, something that over time gives them credibility with judges, but right now I just can't see where an ace might be hiding.
There has also been recent action in the SCO-IBM case: IBM filed an elegant and reasonable-sounding counter-claim. It's an interesting document because it wraps IBM's case in the flag of open source and the GPL. IBM is represented by Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
Meanwhile SCO insiders have been selling stock at a decent clip .
The whole SCO-Linux thing is too big to summarize here. If you're just coming in at the middle, the places to go for more info are Slashdot and especially a great blog called Groklaw. Worryingly, Groklaw—imprisoned by the responsibilities of success—is about to have a bit of an identity crisis.
Last week, VeriSign, the people who run the .com registry (the big data file that has all the .com registration data in it), unilaterally decided to change the way the most-traveled portion of the Internet works for most people. Until then, if you typed in a .com domain name that didn't exist, you would get an error message. Unless, of course, you were an MSN or AOL subscriber, in which case you would get a custom web page they each designed, and which included some ads from folks who thought that they might profit from common misspellings.
Well, VeriSign saw a profit opportunity, and it decided to eat AOL's and MSN's and everyone else's lunch by introducing its “Sitefinder” service. In the new .com, every browser typo, every attempt to load up (the technical term is “resolve”) a domain that didn't actually exist, leads you to special pages designed and owned by VeriSign…and on which we are all invited to buy tailored advertising. [Sitefinder, incidentally, has the most unintentionally hilarious terms of service I have ever seen : a web page you go to by accident, and only because VeriSign made you, links to the adhesive assertion that “By using the service(s) provided by VeriSign under these Terms of Use, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to be bound by all terms and conditions here in and documents incorporated by reference.” But I digress.]
Naturally, MSN and AOL are unhappy. But the technical community is furious. The web is not the whole Internet, and there are many other Internet tools that rely on getting the standard error message when a domain does not resolve properly. VeriSign's change threatened to break all those applications. [There are a lot of ccTLDs (national top-level domains like .ph) and one gTLD (.museum) that already do the same thing. But they are almost all very low volume, and their users were—in the main—forewarned before they registered their domains.]
The technical community responded by coding up changes to BIND, the dominant software for translating domain names into the Internet Protocol numbers that actually do the real work of identifying where the content you want is to be found, and telling the computer that has it how to find you. These changes essentially overtrump the VeriSign change. But fixes like this take time to deploy and propagate. It would be much tidier if VeriSign could be persuaded to put the cat back in the bag.
I am off to Washington, DC to attend the 31st Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy known to all as TPRC, for Telecommunications Policy Research Council. Here’s the abstract of Virtual Worlds, Real Rules (.pdf), the paper I’ll be co-presenting with Caroline Bradley — who is more than just a co-author:
In Virtual Worlds such as Ultima Online and Everquest, the Internet may accidentally provide an environment that lends itself well to the testing of legal rules.
A growing literature suggests that there is a relationship between certain legal rules and economic well-being. Data about the economic consequences of rules would enormously enrich debates over economic regulation. Unfortunately, in the real world experimenting with legal rules can be costly and risky. Some scholars of comparative law attempt to draw lessons by comparing the diverse experiences of different countries, but these efforts too often fall prey to errors of cultural, not to mention legal, translation.
Virtual worlds could permit experiments without the real-world costs of bad rules or regulatory competition. Existing role playing games tend to include internal market regulations that resemble those seen in Western capitalist economies. These rules could be changed, or different versions of the game might use different variants. Online role playing games would provide better data than economic models because it should be possible to design the games to reduce the number of assumptions involved. Moreover, game participants are likely to care about outcomes more than participants in laboratory-based experiments, if only because resource constraints force these to be conducted for low stakes.
Despite the name, and the historic focus on straight telecoms, in the past four or five years TPRC emerged as the place to go for interesting work on Internet and e-commerce. Uniquely among the conferences I attend, the organizers were not only interdisciplinary, but managed a good mix of business school and law school types. Even more unusual was the positively military insistence that papers be in on time, well before the conference, or you lost your free admission. In my experience TPRC draws very good papers from very good people. In its former venue TPRC had great soft chairs in the common area, where you could sit for hours talking to colleagues while missing out on sitting on the hard chairs in the lecture rooms.
Jotwell Blenderlaw