CooperMills

Archive for September, 2009

The website of the Prime Minister and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) were the subject of an attack yesterday, in support of protest against the Government’s internet filtering program.

This type of attack is called a Denial of Service attack, where hackers flood a website with traffic causing the website to go down. This is a regular occurrence across the internet, but this time the motivation was political and specifically targeted at both the Prime Minister who government introduced the policy, and the ACMA who are administering the internet filtering trials.

It is reported that the attack occurred shortly after 7pm AEST, which took the affected websites off line for a short period of time, both sites now appear to be operating normally.

The attack allegedly carried out by the hacker known as ‘Anonymous’, was labelled as juvenile by Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy today.

The attack demonstrates how deeply unpopular the government’s planned internet filtering is within the community. This time most have been surprised at what lengths protesters are prepared to go to, to make their point. Is this just the start ?

Tags: censorship, internet filtering, IT Lawyer, Telecommunications Lawyers
Posted in ISP and Telco Law, IT Law | Comments Off

The US Federal Court has awarded USD$33 million to Verizon Communications Inc, as a result of OnlineNIC registering and monetising domain names which were found to have infringed trademarks belonging to Verizon.

The Court found OnlineNIC to have registered numerous domain names in bad faith, in an attempt to mislead and take advantage of potential Verizon customers.  The Court concluded that OnlineNIC’s behavour was in “blatant and wilful violation” of the US Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, by registering approximately 663 domain names that infringed 26 Verizon trademarks.

Among the 663 domain names registered in bad faith by OnlineINC were www.verizononline.com, www.verizonwireless.com and www.verizonphoneservices.com. The Court awarded the costs and damages at USD$50,000.00 per domain name registered by OnlineINC, which was “confusingly similar” or identical to Verizon trademarks.

Vice president and associate general counsel for Verizon, Sarah Deutsch said:

“We hope the Court’s decision goes a long way toward protecting consumers from becoming targets of Internet abuses and frauds”.

The judgment is not likely to have any serious impact on the .au space, and proceedings brought against domain name owners for trademark breaches.

Tags: domain law, domain lawyer, domaining, Verizon
Posted in Domain law and domaining | Comments Off