This case sets a major precedent in that there are no laws currently in place to protect domain name theft. States like California consider an internet domain name similar to a piece of real estate – if it’s stolen, although it’s a long and expensive process, the owner may have a remedy to get it returned.  But most other states like New York or New Jersey consider the domain name a piece of “intellectual property” similar to a copyright or trademark, and owners have no legal recourse to get back that stolen asset.  Domain name owners hope that this case will instigate new legislature that will protect these valuable properties.

Ostrofsky, author of the New York Times best-selling book Get Rich Click!, The Ultimate Guide To Making Money Online, is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having bought the domain name Business.com for $150,000 in 1995 and sold it a few years later for a world record $7.5 million.   Transactions like the one involving Business.com helped to make transactions in domain names a hot investment prospect.  But laws creating remedies for victims of domain theft have lagged behind market progress.

Albert Angel, who spoke at the sentencing, said “in our effort to redress the injuries inflicted on us, we came to appreciate how undeveloped this area of the law is, and how victims of domain theft face an unmarked and totally uphill battle to get a remedy. Today’s sentencing helps to define a path for other victims and law enforcers to follow, and reinforces the likelihood that the theft of a domain can and will be prosecuted.”

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Nominet is taking a more consultative approach to policy development, and has published more details of its new process framework at www.nominet.org.uk/policy

The policy process is designed to ensure participation from the broadest group of stakeholders possible. It can involve the development of an ‘issue group’ to discuss issues relating to .uk policy, which encourages participation from relevant stakeholders around the UK. These groups will discuss specific issues and provide policy recommendations to Nominet’s Board for consideration. This ensures that Nominet hears the considered opinion of relevant stakeholders prior to making any policy decisions.

The policy process is managed by the Nominet Secretariat and all interested parties can sign up for updates at www.nominet.org.uk/policy/signup

In addition, Nominet today announces updates on two current issues.

Criminal Activity involving use of domains

The Dealing with domain names used in connection with criminal activity issue group is being formed, in response to a proposal submitted by Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). The publication of this proposal led to a wide range of stakeholders expressing an interest in being involved in the discussion. Nominet is calling for those wanting to put themselves forward to take part directly to register by 23rd February.

It is anticipated that the group will be selected by 2nd March, and will meet for the first time later that month. An independent summary of the issue has been commissioned and will be circulated to stakeholders and issue group members in advance of first meeting of the issue group.

Expired Domain Tasting

Expired Domain Tasting is a proposal for an issue group.

The policy process was started with a proposal submitted by a Nominet member regarding the monetisation or traffic monitoring on expired domains by registrars.

Nominet is calling for stakeholders to comment on the proposal, or the treatment of expired domains more generally, by 2nd March. A decision as to whether this issue proposal will progress to the constitution of an issue group will be based on the feedback received. Comments can be submitted at www.nominet.org.uk/policy/issuegroups/contribute

Eleanor Bradley, Director of Operations at Nominet comments: “We’d encourage anyone that wants to be involved in the process to get in touch and have their say. We want to gather the broadest range of feedback possible across all matters of .uk policy and feed it into our policy development process.”

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As the Internet plays an increasingly huge role in everyday life, consumers and businesses are increasingly looking for help and advice on a range of online issues.

• Research conducted amongst UK consumers revealed that the top Internet related concerns were online banking, safe and legal downloading, security and ensuring content is appropriate for young children.

• In September this year, there were 31,000 Google searches for ’Internet safety’, 60,500 searches for ‘cyber bullying’ and 34,000 searches for ‘computer virus’.

• Security risks are also growing, with almost 80,000 people falling victim to Internet fraud in the first nine months of 2010 – a 10 per cent jump on last year.*

Knowthenet.org.uk aims to help Internet users get the most out of the Internet. The site provides advice, information and video content for consumers and business users across three broad categories of Internet activity:

• Getting started online – including introductions to blogging, social networks, online banking etc
• Staying safe online –a library of material on a range of topics from password choice and phishing scams to privacy settings on social networks
• Doing business online – explaining key issues businesses need to understand when doing business online, from SEO to intellectual property

“Information is only a click away on the Internet. The challenge is that often people don’t always know what to trust, or where to go. Free, impartial advice is hard to come by. We’ve launched the knowthenet site to bridge this knowledge gap, addressing concerns and offering impartial, useful advice which gives people the confidence and know-how to do more online,” explains Phil Kingsland, Marketing & Communications Director at Nominet.

Nominet is supporting knowthenet.org.uk as part of its commitment to making the Internet a more trusted space for all. “We see knowthenet playing an important part in our commitment to making the Internet a more trusted space for everyone who uses it – it’s vital for the wider digital economy” explains Lesley Cowley, Chief Executive of Nominet.

The site aims to provide a starting point for people to gather information on how to get more out of the Internet, pointing users to other trusted Internet resources such as GetSafeOnline and Identitytheft.org.uk for more detailed information.

The front page of the website will be updated several times a week with short posts that will provide practical advice for consumers and businesses as media stories break and major new online developments occur, from security scares to new Internet trends, explaining the implications in straightforward terms and giving practical advice to readers.

Knowthenet.org.uk users can also follow site updates via Twitter, comment on stories and suggest additional topics.

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The platform allows individuals and organisations – including jobbing professionals, industry experts, companies, charities, partnerships, Government bodies and others with valuable knowledge – to easily share their know-how and opinions with an audience that is searching for answers to life’s everyday questions. Videojug Pages will create communities of knowledgeable and expert enthusiasts grouped around shared interests, all producing high-quality, factual and informative content for which they are financially rewarded. It will appeal to experts in a wide range of specialist fields: from professional stylists offering their beauty tips, to foodies sharing their favourite recipes and home cooking know-how.

For brands, Videojug Pages offers commercial opportunities to target and interact with these communities through both branded content hubs and display and video advertising. Panasonic is the first brand to have signed up to the platform, providing expert photography content and advice.

Videojug Pages will place video and display ads from its exisiting network of partners on these high quality pages, splitting the revenue 50:50 with the content creators. Contributors can also run Google AdSense and Amazon ads on their pages. Because of the search engine power of Videojug.com, the new Videojug Pages platform will enable content creators to attract traffic straight off the bat – a valuable benefit for expert, niche bloggers whose valuable views are not generating the traffic they would have hoped for on randomly organised blogging platforms.

The key features of Videojug Pages are:

• Free and easy-to-use editing tools allow content creators to publish content in a professional format, using video as well as text and images for enhanced user engagement.

• Videojug Pages custom built community tools, such as ‘mini-forums’ enable content creators to quickly build a community around their specialist knowledge and content.

• Hierarchical structure of the site groups similar content together making it easier to browse; this encourages more page and video views, driving greater revenues for content creators.

• Collaborative publishing tools allow likeminded people to pool their knowledge and collaborate on the same piece of content and to share equally in the revenue from that content.

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At the moment, there are currently 100 million unique game players a month on Facebook, most of these are playing casual games.  With the addition of a dedicated games department the numbers of gamers on Facebook is likely increase, as hard-core games may find their way onto the social network, attracting even larger audiences.

Facebook has proved  the ideal playground for casual gamers, as most don’t have time to play for long periods nor do they want to spend much or any money. Applications found on Facebook are generally free but it has also implemented a credit system where users can earn Facebook currency to spend within games.

Ben Padley, Head of Digital and CRM for Sony Ericsson, says: “Facebook’s gaming community looks set to grow, which is very exciting for small and large game developers alike. Brands can quite easily offer people what many Facebook users seem to desire when visiting the site – quick to play, fun social games.

“Sony Ericsson incorporated the computer pinball game, Emusicon Pinball, on its global community page to give the fans of the brand a bit of fun competition by playing a well recognised, classic arcade game against their friends.”

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Yahoo have since capitalised on this move through a smart programme of hiring, and luring in high profile names such as Ben Stiller, whose ‘webisodes’ will be created and broadcast exclusively on the Yahoo! site. The search engine company have been making strides towards the ultimate goal of 20% original content since 2007, with the formation of Yahoo! Sports. In the development of this new dimension, Yahoo! brought in a series of editors and bloggers tasked with the job of writing original articles.

By moving into this arena, and by taking steps to evolve their business model from a search engine provider to a content provider, Yahoo! are now in direct competition with companies such as AOL and even the New York Times.

In fact, according to eBizMBA.com, Yahoo! News is the most popular news site in the USA with 70 million unique monthly visitors.

This has brought comment from the online world, with SEO company QueryClick.com who have highlighted the importance of originally produced material:

“For Yahoo!, it is the difference between covering a news story, and breaking one. The benefits of self produced content are significant, insofar as they not only enable the site to move into the more lucrative arena of content generation, but also enhance the reputation of the site as an authoritative figure in journalism.”

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The over 50s are becoming an increasingly large group who are becoming more confident in using the internet for shopping and general use.  With internet use on such an increase, especially within a group which was commonly associated with being low users of the internet, it is important for businesses not to ignore the potential business growth possibilities.  People aged 50 + now account for 30% of all British online users, and with this in mind businesses need to ensure they make use of the potential on offer with this new consumer market.

Source:  www.punchcomms.com

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We were called earlier this week by a journalist working for the The National, an English language newspaper in Dubai.  We asked to comment on the cybersquatting of the burjkhalida.com domain – the Burj Khalifa being Dubai’s recently opened world’s tallest building.

As reported in the article:

“Dubai’s surprise name-change for the world’s tallest building may have opened a million-dirham window of opportunity for savvy internet entrepreneurs.

What had been known from its inception as Burj Dubai was officially unveiled as Burj Khalifa during the inauguration ceremony on Monday night.

Dozens of people immediately flocked to the internet to attempt to buy variations of the building’s dot-com or dot-ae domain name.”

The full article and our comments are currently featured at http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100106/NATIONAL/701059815/1010

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As a consequence of this action – apparently the first change to the Times Online’s blocking policy since May 2008 – two million visitors to NewsNow.co.uk every month will no longer find headlines and links to content on the Times Online site in their news search results.

NewsNow MD Struan Bartlett

According to Struan Bartlett, Managing Director and Chairman of NewsNow:  “It is lamentable that News International has chosen to request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it looks as though NewsNow has been singled out. We note that no other major search engine has been blocked by NI in this manner. NewsNow is not fundamentally different to other news search engines that are part of the Internet infrastructure, such as Google News and Yahoo. Why block us and not them?”

The blocking has been technically implemented via the robots.txt protocol which requests search engines, web spiders and other web robots to refrain from asking for pages from all or part of a website.

Continues Bartlett: “We can understand why a website would attempt to block a search engine that was abusing its resources or blatantly stealing content. But this clearly isn’t the case with NewsNow. The freedoms to link and quote sources and compare and contrast reported views are press freedoms on which News International itself relies. Arbitrary attacks on news search engines therefore undermine press freedom, as well as the entire basis on which the Internet runs. NI is asking us to accept restrictions on our freedom to link to publicly available information that it would not accept itself.”

In December 2009, NewsNow decided to pull all links to many national newspaper websites from its subscription service following attempts by The Newspaper Licensing Agency Limited (the NLA) to impose a scheme that introduced the requirement to obtain permission and pay fees to circulate links to freely available web pages. The scheme has subsequently been referred to the Copyright Tribunal.

Although News International is not party to the scheme, it may be the first major UK media organisation to try to introduce the same requirement through selectively blocking search engines from linking to its websites. Concludes Bartlett: “The question remains whether News International, in arbitrarily blocking individual search engines, is trying to use its muscle to gain unreasonable control over the public’s freedom to choose the way they access information and news online. These are precisely some of the reasons why we and many others support The Right2Link Campaign.”

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Linking – referencing someone else’s online intellectual property with a headline, short quote or summary with attribution – is standard practice for users of the Internet. Email and social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn are often used to share links among friends, associates and colleagues.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, as well as other new economy businesses that act as portals and link aggregators, occupy a key role in identifying links that are of interest to be read and passed on. They are a key part of the World Wide Web’s system of circulating information.

According to Right2Link, the free circulation of publicly accessible information is threatened if individuals, businesses and search engines cannot continue to do what they are doing today without restraint.

Recent months have seen a climate developing, in which governments and media owners have articulated an increasingly restrictive and repressive attitude towards Internet freedoms, and in which there have been a number of disturbing developments threatening to restrict the freedom to link.

First, heads of large media corporations, among them Rupert Murdoch of News Corp and Gavin O’Reilly of Independent News & Media, have accused search engines and link aggregators of stealing their content. They have ventured to suggest that publishing headlines and short excerpts, widely accepted as permissible under the law, should be made illegal.

Second, some industry members and commentators have voiced concerns that the Government’s new Digital Economy Bill will threaten information sharing freedoms.

Third, the UK’s major print media owners have sought to establish a counter-productive precedent by demanding organisations obtain permission to use links to the newspaper websites and for forwarding them on. The danger in this precedent is that it threatens to give any media organisation or website owner the right to demand that permission be obtained before linking. They would be able to cherry-pick who they would allow to link to their web site and at what price. This would generate a climate of uncertainty about linking that would damage the Internet’s ethos of freedom of information exchange and restrict people’s and organisations’ ability to conduct their business freely.

Opponents of this trend towards restrictions on the freedom to link include online new economy businesses, search engines, portals and aggregators, enlightened new media publishers, members and representatives of the PR industry and organisations who already realise their online freedom on the World Wide Web is under threat.

However, Right2Link warns that any organisation, including charities and government departments, is open to being threatened with legal action or targeted for “license” fees by any website owner if the freedom to link is not enshrined in law and in practice as an Internet right for all.

The founding sponsor of Right2Link is NewsNow, the UK’s largest news portal. The campaign is fully supported by others in the sector including Meltwater, Alacra and Zenark.

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