
A years-long domain name feud ended in a bloody shootout - pslattery
https://onezero.medium.com/the-influencer-and-the-hit-man-6c3905efd3c3
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teh_klev
Previous discussion from earlier today:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21751762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21751762)

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tzs
Technically, is that actually a shootout? Or is it back to back shootings?
There was only one gun, which the first guy used to shoot the second, and then
the second guy took the gun and shot the first.

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basseq
The outcome and illegal actions here are reprehensible, but from what I'm
reading, all this could have been avoided with better ICANN and U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office practices.

Specifically, this:

1\. Rossi Adams founded State Snaps.

2\. "The slogan 'Do It For State' sprouted organically, and soon became
synonymous with the State Snaps brand — a catch-all when referring to [State
Snaps]..."

3\. Ethan Deyo "had side hustles as domain brokers: buying up URLs and
flipping them for a profit".

4\. Deyo buys DoItForState.com _specifically_ to capitalize off State Snaps.

5\. Deyo starts using #DoItForState and trademarks the name.

6\. Adams gets mad.

So Deyo is a total parasite. IANAL and all that, but Adams had should have
been able to show prior use / common law trademark protection. USPTO should
have denied Deyo's trademark application—or Adams should have been able to get
it revoked—then this should have been a pretty clear-cut ICANN trademark
dispute ruled in favor of Adams.

All that's to say that I understand Adams' frustration. Though I haven't seen
any evidence that Adams tried to protect his trademark legally.

Then, of course, you get into the threats and the gun violence and the
ridiculous, immature, illegal stuff.

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mattl
A domain name, not a URL.

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Rebelgecko
I recently heard some stories about a colleague of a colleague who owned
sex.com and had a similar (slightly less extreme) experience. Crazy to hear
how common it is for domain disputes to leak into the real world with such
serious consequences.

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omarhaneef
Okay, I know a lot of us just post this:

[https://outline.com/aqUgJ6](https://outline.com/aqUgJ6)

What are the ethics of posting this? Did I prevent people from paying for a
paywall? Does the author expect to get paid from that? Or is medium just
forcing me to sign up, and there is no money being exchanged?

Should I not feel better about giving a way around a sign up? Even if its not
monetary, am I depriving medium of value?

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0xffff2
I honestly can't understand how this is anything other than copyright
infringing piracy. If I put the full text of every book on the New York Times
bestseller list up on a website, surely I would, at the very least, be forced
to take it down and no one would be particularly sympathetic to me. Why is
this any different? Because the original medium is digital? Because it's
technically easy to circumvent the paywall? I don't get it.

~~~
bsder
> I honestly can't understand how this is anything other than copyright
> infringing piracy.

The ethics are "If your article returns in Google, I should be able to read
it." If I can't read it, it shouldn't appear on Google.

Unfortunately, I can't enforce this, personally. So, I'm quite happy with
these sites that bypass paywalls like these.

When I find a site that has a paywall but _doesn 't_ show up in my Google
search results, we can talk about ethics again.

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0xffff2
What do you mean by "returns in Google"? If you simply mean that the article
shows up in search results, I'm not sure how that's different from the books
in my original example. Certainly you'll get links to books on the bestseller
list for related search results.

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wincy
The google user agent crawler is given the full text of the article, I
believe. So the companies are trying to have to both ways, by providing the
article wholly to the web crawler that indexes the page, but then expecting
users to pay for it.

~~~
0xffff2
So what? Authors give out free copies of their books to reviewers. Is the line
supposed to be that if someone gets the article for free then everyone has to
get it for free?

~~~
bsder
Not at all. Give me a way to remove all paywalled links from my Google search
and I'll be quite happy, thanks.

Google used to penalize sites _dramatically_ that provided different views to
search engine versus user. However, that apparently impacted their ad revenues
so it went away.

