A years-long domain name feud ended in a bloody shootout | Hacker News Reader

A years-long domain name feud ended in a bloody shootout

onezero.medium.com

58 pointspslattery19 comments

Previous discussion from earlier today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21751762

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.

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.

A domain name, not a URL.

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.

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

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?

justice.gov does not have a paywall... Not yet at least.

So not sure what you're talking about

But we are talking about longread here, not justice.gov. I think you are confused between this thread and the parallel thread on the same subject.

for me the link is to medium; and I'm always able to just [x] the "paywall" and read it anyway on medium

Same here. I get rather confused when people keep talking about being paywalled on medium. I can only assume their experience of the site is different, but I have no idea in what way, or why.

After a certain number of reads of medium, you aren't allowed to read any article without giving them a social login.

must be a lot of reads. I've read enough that I get prompted for a social login, but never so much that I can't [x] out the prompt.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Why is that?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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