A lot of attorneys spoke on Capital Hill yesterday on the Senate Judiciary hearing on Online Theft and Domain Seizure Bill.

Counsels for Rosetta Stone, Verizon, Visa and  Christine Jones from Godaddy were among those invited to speak.

At issue is the bill proposed by Senator Leahy which would give the feds even more rights to seize domains (although ICE has been doing plenty of this without such authority)

Most of those that spoke agreed that the law was a good idea, needed to combat the sale and distribution of trademarked goods and intellectual property, as long as the law clearly provided no rights for private action against those taking the sites down.

So if your site gets taken down by mistake, like the 84,000 that got shut down and labeled as child porn last week by ICE, they want to make sure that the owners of the sites have no ability to sue their ISP, their registrar and certainly not the government for such action. (we will have another post on this today).

Visa likewise doesn’t want any responsibility or liability  for being the one who shuts down merchant accounts which actually collect most of the money for the fake products.

The most interesting part of the hearing which I listened to for a couple of hours was the testimony from Rosetta Stone who has a long standing, ongoing lawsuit with Google.

Rosetta Stone, like most domain holders can’t get their head around how using a trademark in a domain is any different than allowing third parties from advertising their products under the trademark holders name on Google, especially when the products being offered by the competitors are clear rip offs or even copies of the trademark holders product.

“We need more protection against Google which has a  70% market share.

“We don’t think you should be able to search on Google and get information on fake  Rosetta Stone products.”

Well said.

and probably an Ad under Google moves more product than a random site.

The good news is that The Google issue is one of the only sticking points that might derail this bill.  Nothing like having Google’s lobbyist on your side.

Of course those selling fake products and music sharing sites are mostly offshore the logical and simple way to avoid this whole bill is to simply use a domain extension that is not located in the US.

While someone raised this issue of “how effective will this bill be in blocking domains as it won’t work as people will leave the US based extensions and use foreign TLD’s.”, it did not seem anyone on the committee wanted to deal with that issue and pretty much simply ignored it.

Other issues that never came up in the hearing was constitutional issues like due process.

There are well over 100 extensions that are not US based, don’t use a US back end provider and would not be effected by this law.

Domain names using non-US TLD’s would also not be subject to the ICE seizures.