Quote:
Originally posted by izopod
... as it stands now we "rent" these names. Is there any such law that would allow users to break a contract and take over ownership of a particular "property"?
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You say "rent" because no registrar is presently offering registration "forever." Hard goods and real estate can be sold "in perpetuity."
Personal property, particularly intangibles, have a more "evanescent value". Copyrights expire seventy years after the death of the author. Doesn't make them any less personal property. The copyright owner (and after death for seventy years, the estate) owns the copyright. The copyright holder has the right to publish, reproduce and create derivative works
for the statutory term. It's a piece of property that burns out eventually. Patents of course have an even shorter term. They are still property. Of course! It's just got a life-span that you figure into the value.
Similarly, domains have a life span, but it differs from a copyright, because it is renewable, potentially
in perpetuity. By ruling that a domain name is property, the court makes the rule of "I'm first in line" the most important rule. If I'm the first to register, I get what? The right to use it until the registration is expired, AND the sole right to renew within the time periods specified. That is what property law professors call a "bundle of rights." To protect the "perpetual" aspect, you must renew, but as long as you do, you can maintain perpetual possession of the name.
Property right bundles can be seen as a matrix of rights. There is the dimension of
time and there is the dimension of extent. The time period of a domain is potentially perpetual -- for as long as the WWW exists. The
extent of a domain is all the traffic that it can magnetize via links and eyeballs.
As to your other ideas, you have valid concerns about overly-intrusive regulation. However, since only
property is protected from unconstitutional seizure by the government, we must consider property ownership to be the ultimate bulwark against excessive regulation. For example, the Eighth Amendment protects property against "uncompensated taking." This constitutional right prevents the government from taking your house away to build a freeway without paying you. Why could this be helpful in the domain name field?
Well, remember the old ".XXX" proposal? Some lawmakers wanted to confine all porn to a separate domain, to make it easier for NetNanny and the other filters to do their job. But it didn't happen. Why? I think because all of the existing adult sites would've said, "NO, you can't take our property that way. We have built up business goodwill (which is property), and trademark recognition, and traffic (which is sacred!) and the Eighth Amendment says you can't evict us from our property." Of course, a hundred First Amendment lawyers would say, "No, that's not the best argument -- the best argument is you can't regulate speech that way." That's when I pop up and say, "Whatever -- let's have ALL the RIGHTS we can get, both Property and Free Speech-- we don't have to choose because both apply."
Hope that was clear :)