Bruce, the secondary art market is possible because a work of art is
complete and has value in and of itself.  A domain name is worthless unless
it has some attached commercial objective - even if it is solely as a
vehicle for advertising.

Whilst in principle I agree that there's a difference between cyber
squatting and transferring a domain name, it's subjective, so how can you
discriminate between cyber squatting and a secondary market?

Ron Stark


:  -----Original Message-----
:  From: dns-bounces+ronstark=snapsite.com.au§dotau.org 
:  [mailto:dns-bounces+ronstark=snapsite.com.au§dotau.org] On 
:  Behalf Of Bruce Tonkin
:  Sent: Saturday, 24 September 2005 12:49 PM
:  To: .au DNS Discussion List
:  Subject: [DNS] Regarding cybersquatting
:  
:   
:  
:  > like
:  > come up with ideas to combat cybersquating other then 
:  prohibition of 
:  > secondary markets??
:  > 
:  
:  Actually cybersquatting is now more likely to occur in the 
:  primary market.
:  
:  The current mechanism of gaining revenue is to register a 
:  domain name that is close to a company's brand and then gain 
:  revenue from advertising on the website associated with that 
:  domain name.
:  See: http://www.melborneit.com (trading off Melbourne IT) as 
:  an example.
:  Here is another old one (http://www.aunic.com.au) (trading 
:  off recognition of AUNIC).
:  In fact in .com, around 20% of new registrations are 
:  associated with registering domain names for the purposes of 
:  earning revenue from pay-per-click advertising.
:  
:  So the old argument against the secondary market on the basis of
:  cybersquatting is mostly irrelevant now.   
:  
:  So I agree with Vic.   Keep cybersquatting and secondary 
:  market concerns
:  completely separate.
:  It is like using the argument of counterfeit paintings as an 
:  argument against people buying or selling paintings in the 
:  secondary art market.
:  Or at a more general level, using the existence of fraud and 
:  deception as an argument against allowing free trade.
:  
:  Regards,
:  Bruce Tonkin
:  
:  
:  
:  
:  
:  -------------------------------------------------------------
:  --------------
:  List policy, unsubscribing and archives => http://dotau.org/
: