

Cybersquatter email - andres

From: "Thomas Li" &#60;mybestnames@gmail.com&#62;<p>Subject: important domain names: octopart.cn &#38; octopart.com.cn<p>
Dear Sirs,<p> 
We have octopart.cn &#38; octopart.com.cn and found that the domains are useful for you if you want to explore China market.<p>  
We can really consider selling them out if you are interested in them.<p> 
Please get back to us with your kind offer.<p> 
Thanks<p> 
Regards,
 <p>Thomas
======
BitGeek
These are not "cybersquatters". Octo and Part are generic terms.

One of the domains I own is a combination of a word that means "software" and
another word that means "place you like to go". I got it for a developers
site... and then after I got it I discovered that there was an italian maker
of luxury goods whose trademark is that word - apparently the combination of
these two english words makes another word completely in italian.

Am I cybersquatting? I've considered selling this domain to them because its
much better than the one that they are currently using. If I sell it to them,
then they will be getting a better domain at a price that they think is fair
(or they wouldn't be buying it).

Some may say I'm being opportunistic and this is wrong- well, I say that my
intent was elsewhere and this was a surprise coincidence... but that my intent
isnt' really relevant. If I'd registered the name then I have perfect rights
to it-- after all if they'd wanted it, why didn't they register it? If I
register it and several years later they decide they want it-- what gives them
the right to demand that I give it to them for free?

Finally, the truth is that I didn't register this domain, I bought it at
auction. so, what's to say what a fair price is?

The idea that these people are "cybersquatters" is an idea of entitlement--
its based on the false notion that you somehow have a right to domain names,
even though you didn't register them when they were free.

This is false. Domain names are an open territory- if you think of it and
register it, its yours. If you later realize you should have registered it,
then its you're error, not the error of the preson who did register it.

They arent' scamming you, they are asking for compensation for the risk they
took in registering it. If hte price they ask is higher than the value of the
domain (and if you have foo.com then foo.cn isn't really that valuable, is
it?) then just don't buy it and let the owner of foo.cn use it for whatever
they want.... why should you care?

If they are using a domain to pretend to be you-- then that would be one
thing, and that's what cybersquatting really means.

But domain speculation, like real estate speculation, is a perfectly
legitimate activity. Where does one get the idea that all names of a certain
category should belong to them even though they couldn't be bothered to
register them?

(Speaking in general here, not to the original poster since he didn't express
much of an opinion, other than to misuse the word cybersquatter)

~~~
kcl
According to the law and from the perspective of the business world, what Mr.
Li & co. are doing is perfectly fine, no one would disagree. You call it
'legitimate', and I think that's a fair description.

Obviously, though, you'll notice that a lot of people don't like what they're
doing. I personally wouldn't go so far as to call it 'unethical', but I know
that I definitely don't agree with what they do, since on a number of levels
it strikes me as wrong.

The legal framework surrounding the purchase and ownership of domain names was
ultimately established by fiat. The model we have is not a sacred construction
that fell out of an economics textbook. It was chosen to represent some idea
of how we thought domain name ownership should be handled. We didn't know how
the domain name market was going to evolve. How could we? It was a radically
new idea with little precedent. The closest thing we had was our model for
physical real-estate, and so that's roughly what we adopted, in an attempt to
make it a fair system.

Early on, though, we realized that our model didn't quite match up to the
expectation of fairness we had for our system, and when a legal framework
fails to match our conception of how things should work, we revise it, and we
do so with more laws. The major law that came out of this was the
Anticybersquatting act, and though it was drafted largely as a result of
corporate interest, it represents our belief that something was wrong with the
framework we had set up. (If I'm going to build a McDonald's, you have to move
your lemonade stand off the piece of real estate labeled MCDONALDS in big bold
letters...on every map ever printed.)

When you say that Mr. Li isn't a cybersquatter, even though it is grossly
obvious he fits that definition
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticybersquatting_Consumer_Pro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticybersquatting_Consumer_Protection_Act)),
whether you agree with it or not, it leads me to believe that you have a
problem with anyone being labeled a 'cybersquatter', on the basis that there
is nothing inherently wrong with the act of cybersquatting.

The problem people have with Thomas Li and octopart.cn, is not that he desires
to own a domain name that somebody else might want. It's that, rather than
engage in some type of productive behavior, Mr. Li has seized upon a
opportunity to make a little money entirely at the expense of the Octopart
company. His behavior is counterproductive. It is of benefit to no one (except
himself). He has created, in effect, a potential loss for Octopart, and now he
is offering them the ability to avoid that loss. The key point here is that he
has created a loss opportunity, and no real gain for anyone. Of course, he has
the potential to gain money for himself, but in the long tradition of ill-
gotten gains, people really won't like him for it, because he won't be
receiving money in exchange for some positive output he's created, he'll be
receiving ransom money in order to not make something worse.

We see a similar thing happening in the parking of domain names on a massive
scale. Mass parking occurs when an entrepreneur buys up thousands of domains,
on the cheap---since most of them haven't been registered---and then sets up
dummy search pages and advertisements on each of them. He never puts original
content on these sites. With judicious use of SEO tricks, he can still get
them to pop up in your Google search, even though nobody in their right mind
would ever link there or even want to visit there in the first place. Do
parked domains actually add value for the consumer? Not likely. At best they
simply rearrange or add vestigial segments to the plumbing of the internet. If
I search for "sony tv" and the first ten results are WALMART.COM and the last
one is TARGET.COM, my search isn't any better than if the first result was
Wal-Mart and the second was Target. All Wal-Mart's done is increase the
probability that I visit their site before I visit Target's...which may
improve their market share, but actually degrades my experience as a consumer.
You'll notice what we have going on is, again, a transfer of wealth, and not a
creation thereof.

The practice of mass domain name parking must make some people a lot of money,
but I don't think that anyone believes this is a desirable feature for the
internet to have.

(Historically, these types of 'transactions' are frowned upon. If I'm a pirate
and I capture your ship, I just got a lot richer, but the net effect on
society is negative, since much work has been expended without the creation of
wealth, and now much more work in the future will have to be expended on
defense, which, short of economic stimulus and R&D, also fails to create
wealth. This is why industrialized societies don't like war, or theft, or
raiding, or vikings, bandits, bank and train robbers, burglars, pirates,
muggers, hijackers, and highwaymen. Their acts are always lucrative for a
small number of people at the severe expense of everyone else. Wouldn't you
rather someone spend all day planning a building instead of a robbery?)

~~~
pixcavator
>With judicious use of SEO tricks, he can still get them to pop up in your
Google search, even though nobody in their right mind would ever link there or
even want to visit there in the first place.

Blame Google for that.

------
andres
octopart.cn and octopart.com.cn were registered on 3/10/07. we launched on
3/05/07.

~~~
BitGeek
this is called enterprising. They aren't pretending to be you, they are just
buying generic domain names that might be useful to someone in the future. You
can either buy them from them, or give them a pass.... that's your choice.

But it seems like you're offended that they offered them to you and that's a
waste of energy.

~~~
edw519
They provide no value to anyone and hold intellectual property hostage for
nothing other than their own personal gain.

What you call "enterprising" I call "pigs feeding at the trough".

Maybe they should find a way to provide value to someone else instead of
domain squatting. Now, THERE'S your waste of energy.

~~~
BitGeek
They are providing value- they risked their own capital to speculate on a
domain name that might be valuable in the future... just like anyone who buys
swampland hoping to drain it. They took risk, they identified a customer for
their property, etc. All these things add value.

They aren't holding intellectual property hostage. And by the way, when is
personal gain evil? Do you go to work each day primarily to benefit other
people, rather than yourself:?

They are providing added value, they registered a domain that someone else
didn't think of.

The problem here is, that you regret not registering it, and so you, rather
than accepting blame for your own failure, are blaming the person who was
smarter or faster than you.

Back in the 1990s, I looked up USWeb.com. I almost registered it, but was on
the fence, then went back three days later to register it and found that it
had been taken the day after I thought of it-- and that company became a big
company eventually before the bust.

Were they holding my intellectual property hostage? No.

Where does this sense of entitlement come from? IT reminds me of people who
build a house in a neighborhood and then complain because a walmart gets built
nearby... as if they think they somehow have property rights in the land that
walmart bought. LOL.

~~~
falsestprophet
No. They are speculating, which does not generate wealth.

~~~
dreish
It can generate wealth in markets where accurate prices lead to more efficient
allocation of the resources needed to produce the good in question.

That's great for physical commodities, but it doesn't take a genius to see
that this doesn't do any good with domain names. It takes a committed
libertarian to fail to see that, though.

~~~
noonespecial
A libertarian would think this kind of thing is repugnent as well. The
difference is that a libertartian's first response would not be "we should
pass a law forbidding this..."

------
viewrcorp
\-------- Original Message -------- Subject: viewr.cn & viewr.com.cn Date:
Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:30:27 +0800 From: Thomas Lee <mybestnames@gmail.com> To:
alex@viewr.com CC: info@viewr.com

viewr.cn & viewr.com.cn Dear Sirs,

We have viewr.cn & viewr.com.cn for your purchase to expand China market which
is to be No.1 market in the world.

Your interest? make offer pls.

Thanks

Regards,

Thomasa

------
snowmaker
We got one, too, at Scribd. Maybe they read news.ycombinator.

~~~
corentin
I guess it's more automated than that; they probably monitor registry updates
with robots.

~~~
cstejerean
I don't know, I registered several domain names recently and did not get any
.cn emails. Maybe my Gmail junk filtered them away.

------
choward93
When i got a business license a couple years ago, someone bought my company's
.com domain mere days after i registered the trade name. The domain is
absolutely useless to them, but they keep it in hope that ill pay them big
time for it. not in their lifetime...

------
tlrobinson
cyber-squatters lie somewhere between the scammers and spammers on my internet
jackass shitlist.

------
edw519
all your base belong to octopart.cn

------
swallace
Beware! all those chinese domains are tainted with lead.

------
rms
I just registered a new, really good, 6 character .com domain and the .cn is
already gone...

------
ph0rque
We got a similar email when we launched i-conserve.com (also with the chinese
domain name).

------
PStamatiou
We (skribit.com) got an email like this within a week of our launch..

------
robertgaal
Yep, we got one too. Idiots.

------
zeantsoi
all your domains are belong to us

