4chan demands 4chan.com domain name

Not quite--eminent domain is also used to take property from people who ARE using it. And I think that is where that debate gets very thorny, because the compensation is not always worth the costs of uprooting someone from their home.

Sure it does. IF you own it.

>These are greedy people just speculatively buying stuff without any real interest. //

This is capitalism. The more damaging domain as you suggest is real-estate. Online the problem becomes simply "oh example.com wasn't right, example.org ... oh, ya, there it is". That might be a very minor annoyance for some people for a couple of seconds.

The problem I see with the "they're not creating a mall" argument is that to the logical conclusion that means that if you have a swimming pool and aren't using it as much as the public feel you should that it can be confiscated. Or, say, you have 2 cars - well clearly you can't drive both at once; repossession by the state, et cetera.

Now I've got some pretty communist sensibilities but unless we're going to implement the whole system and treat all properties in this way (I'd really like to use one of the many, many over-priced vacant commercial premises in our city) then I can't see how you can really move on this?

Things are not always black and white. If Google decides to squat on a domain for a future project, would you still called it squatting? Or them owning Google.io despite not having a business in these tiny islands be considered squatting too?

Under US law you sure do.

You also have to define "waste". The owners of 4chan.com are obviously holding onto their domain because they see it as a valuable asset. I doubt they'd see this as wasting their property. They're watching it grow in value.

Your argument would virtually have us outlaw anyone from holding onto an asset if it could immediately be used better by somebody else.

As a counter-example: Why should anyone be allowed to horde gold? There's a gold shortage and it would be of much more use in computer manufacturing.

That's obviously insane, and yet it's essentially the same scenario.

I understand that it would be better for the common good if 4chan.com was owned by 4chan.org, but if we're playing the game of Capitalism, then these are the rules.

As far as I understand it, if I'm wasting a bunch of land and refuse to sell it, but there's a million acres next door that you can buy for pennies and your project will work just as well there as it would on my land, there's no case for eminent domain. Go buy that other land and build there.

Eminent domain is for stuff like, we're building a highway from here to there, and the only reasonable route is through there, and that's where your property sits, so we'll take it from you even if you don't want to sell, because this highway will have a big public benefit that outweighs your personal property rights. If the highway can just move half a mile to the left to the land of someone who wants to sell, then you do that instead.

On the internet, all property is adjacent and nothing has to be in a particular spot. The supply of domain names is effectively infinite. I don't see the case for taking one just because the owner is "wasting" it. You don't need that specific domain, just buy the one "next door", which on the internet is all of them.

Actually, a lot of the debate about eminent domain is who is on the receiving end of the property. Eminent domain is supposed to be about the taking of private property for public use. E.g., building a school. It gets a lot more dicey when you start taking A's private property and making it B's private property.

Someone bought myname s myindustry.com and occasionally sends me an email that it's going up for auction soon and enquires if I'm interested. I've just ignored them in the hope they get the point. They have been trying to make it seem like there's lots of other demands, when there's absolutely no reason to buy it other than the kind of similarity to my domain.

It can't even be profitable typosquatting. Nowdays the domain just redirects to a newer domain of mine and has been for a number of years, so in the unlikely event that someone tried to type in my current domain exactly and mispelled it, they still wouldn't end up on that domain. The only reason I keep up the registration is Google's inability to swap the primary domain on Google Apps.

I didn't get it (regardless of the back-order), but it got bought up by a domain squatting company who now want about $4K for it. It is currently parked with a horrendous page that doesn't even render correctly.

Now if my my .co.uk site were to get popular (hah!), I fully expect that price tag to increase.

It's a bizarre system.

If you have established use of a mark before the registration (or use) of a competing/conflicting mark, you can defend it.

In fact, registration arguably provides no protection other than the fact that it makes it easier to search for your mark in the USPTO registry.

I wonder what the ad revenue would be from that domain? And would m00t be able to put ads on 4chan.com?

You going to tell JWZ (one of the early netscape developers) that hes going to have to give up jwz.org good luck with that .