DomainSponsor's Enhances Traffic and Monetization Platform

Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:40:00 +0000

DomainSponsor's Enhances Traffic and Monetization Platform

DomainSponsor®, the domain monetization division of Oversee.net® and organizer of the DOMAINfest Global® conference, has released DS NextGen(TM) an updated platform that enhances publishers' ability to maximize the return on their global domain name assets.

The company will highlight the updated platform at the DOMAINfest Global conference, taking place January 26-28, 2010, in Santa Monica, Calif.

The launch follows a year of worldwide economic difficulty that has caused publishers to carefully consider how their domain names can benefit from developing trends in online media. According to Peter Celeste, an Oversee Senior Vice President and General Manager of Monetization Services, Oversee has invested heavily in optimization and monetization in order to meet market challenges head-on.

"The system's infrastructure -- including available data, load times, optimizations -- has been redesigned with our clients' needs in mind," Celeste said. "What's particularly attractive, though, is that the platform is flexible enough to ramp up optimization in multiple markets. This ensures that publishers worldwide, and publishers with global domain name portfolios, can now benefit from the same high levels of monetization that DomainSponsor has always been known for."

System features

The enhanced platform features:

-- Faster optimization. The heart of the design is the ability to
deliver UNIQUE, very highly optimized pages as quickly as possible, so
publishers' traffic always monetizes at the highest level.
-- Increased stability. The platform's distributed architecture ensures
maximum uptime for all traffic.
-- Better global response times. DomainSponsor is actively expanding its
global reach to attract high-quality traffic worldwide. DS NextGen
scales to allow DomainSponsor to better serve pages from all parts of
the world.
-- Faster load times. Streamlined page-serving technology reduces the
amount of time necessary to render a web page, translating into more
traffic.
-- Examining traffic inflow for new ways to optimize. DomainSponsor is
more thoroughly examining the traffic that comes into the network,
allowing the platform to find new and creative ways of optimizing
traffic.


First of several anticipated changes

Celeste says DS NextGen will continue to evolve over 2010.


"Domain name monetization will continue to transform," he said. "Having a platform that allows us to easily and continually optimize as well as support new sources of traffic is a significant advantage. We expect to leverage the strengths of our new platform and bring the benefits to our publishers."

Additional information will be available at DOMAINfest. Customers can also get an update by contacting their account representatives and visiting the DomainSponsor booth at the event.

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Politicians’ names banned from national domain

Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:27:00 +0000

Politicians’ names banned from national domain

People and companies will not be able to register domain names on the new national Internet domain if they include the names of famous politicians and officials, the Russian registrar announced on Tuesday.

The stop-list with the no-go names has been issued by the administration of the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, spokesman for the registrar Andrey Kolesnikov said.

He did not specify who is on the stop-list or whether the ban would be permanent or remain in power only during pre-launch period of the new national domain.

Websites in Cyrillic ending with the “.рф” extension will become public in 2010, after the Internet supervision body ICANN gave the green light to names spelled in non Latin alphabet characters. Other national domains will also appear.

Currently there are restrictions on the registration of Cyrillic websites, which are meant to fend off cyber squatters and swindlers.

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Long Island restaurant closing after trademark suit by Southwest Florida chain

Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 14:50:00 +0000

Long Island restaurant closing after trademark suit by Southwest Florida chain

When Frank Ryan was asked to leave Rib City Grill in East Naples in 2007, the general manager signed an agreement not to compete or use the restaurant’s trade secrets, recipes, or food preparation techniques for 10 years.

So managers of the Fort Myers-based restaurant, which has franchises in seven other states, were surprised when they received an e-mail about its Long Island, N.Y., restaurant: They had no restaurant there.

It turned out it was Ryan’s restaurant, Rib City Ale House in Port Jefferson Station.

So Rib City Group’s attorney sent Ryan a cease-and-desist letter, telling him “Rib City,” its layout, smiling pig, menus, recipes, food preparation techniques, Internet name, and other material was trademark-protected.

Ryan’s attorney called it an “inadvertent mistake, a coincidence,” and said Ryan would remove the Rib City name. He didn’t.

So Rib City Group filed a trademark infringement lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Fort Myers, accusing Ryan of misappropriating trade secrets, and of violating the Lanham Act, Trademark Act, and Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act.

The lawsuit, filed last month, contends Rib City Ale House uses the trademarked smiling pig, several of the same menu items, Rib City signs and awnings, and a Rib City Web address.

Fort Myers attorney Karl C. Landsteiner, who represents Rib City Group Inc., declined comment on the lawsuit because it’s pending. He’s co-counsel with Lindsey M. Straus of Stoneham, Mass.

Ryan, however, said he was embarrassed and would close his restaurant.

“We were trying to change our name, but with the economy the way it is, we’re going to shut down,” Ryan said. “I was going to close it anyway.”

“I never thought anyone could have a copyright on Rib City,” Ryan said. “Who are they to have the right to Rib City everything? All I can say to everybody is, ‘Geez. I’m sorry.’ ”

Ryan, who said he’d been in the hospitality and restaurant business roughly 45 years, contended his restaurant uses a “totally different concept” and is a 240-seat restaurant with a 120-seat lounge.

He admitted some menu items were the same. Menus show the Skyscraper Sandwich, Three-Cheese Fries, Buffalo Popcorn Shrimp, and From the Field Salads are on both menus.

“I would certainly know Rib City Grill is a protected name, but I wouldn’t know Rib City Ale House was,” Ryan said, adding that he immediately took down his Web site, www.ribcityalehouse.com. “We never realized they had a copyright or a registered name using Rib City in any form.”

Rib City Grill, which began in Fort Myers in 1989, was purchased in 1995 by Paul Peden and his son, Craig, both of Fort Myers. Three years later, they formed Rib City Group, which opened 11 more restaurants in South Florida, including North Naples, East Naples and Immokalee.

In 2004, the Web site says, the group began franchising and now has 28 restaurants in eight states, including 16 franchises.

It owns Internet domain names, including ribcity.com, ribcitygrill.com, and ribcitybarbeque.com, according to the lawsuit, which says it obtained patents for various trademarks in 2002 and twice in 2008.

The lawsuit contends Ryan’s use of the name continued unabated after Ryan’s attorney, Tamar Y. Duvdevani of New York, admitted the trademark infringement and wrote in a June 29 e-mail to Straus that Ryan had rebranded and selected a new name that didn’t contain Rib City.

The lawsuit says Ryan incorporated his business about a year after signing the non-compete agreement, then launched a Web site using many Rib City trademarks, including its smiling pig, silhouette of a city skyline at night, and menu with some of the same items and identical or nearly identical descriptions.

After the cease-and-desist letter, the lawsuit says, Ryan’s Web site wasn’t accessible or visible without a password, but Rib City Ale House still offered coupons, advertised, and planned an expansion. It also received negative restaurant reviews, says the lawsuit, noting that the similar name would confuse the public into thinking it’s affiliated with Rib City Grill.

The lawsuit asks a judge to issue a preliminary injunction and permanent injunction to prohibit Ryan from using the name, smiling pig, Web site, and other trademarks and to find his use of trade secrets willful.

Ryan said his smiling pig was just generic artwork he found on the Internet.

“The smiling piggy is gone,” he said. “I feel horrible. I put a lot of money into this place.”

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Baidu's Management Cracks: Both the CTO and COO have departed in the last 2 weeks

Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:23:00 +0000

Baidu's Management Cracks: Both the CTO and COO have departed in the last 2 weeks

Even though the news of the past week has been focused on the showdown between Google Inc. and the Chinese government’s policies of online content censorship, the homegrown search engine favorite, Baidu, Inc. has been experiencing its own difficulties with both its CTO and COO resigning within 10 days of each other. According to The Financial Times, Baidu announced the resignation of Yinan Li, its CTO on January 18th, only 10 days after the company announced the resignation of Dr. Peng Ye, its COO, on January 8th.

Although the company’s announcements for both executives indicated that each was leaving for “personal reasons” there sudden departures have fueled plenty of speculation on the true health of Baidu. The company’s last financial release was back in October 2009 and during the company’s earnings conference call (full transcript at Seekingalpha.com), Haoyu Shen, VP of Business Operations, said that the company was expecting to take a 10% revenue hit from fully transitioning to its new professional advertising platform, Phoenix Nest. Much of the conference call focused on whether the new platform would ultimately be a winner for Baidu as many analysts have found reluctance by advertisers to fully shift their spending from the old system to the new.

So while there seems to be some internal disagreements over the wrenching switch to Phoenix Nest, that is most likely the reason for the executive departures, some other reasons that have been suggested include:

* Google-China showdown: Why this would lead anyone to leave Baidu is beyond me since the company is expected to be a huge beneficiary of search traffic if Google becomes unavailable in China. As Chinese citizens I would find it hard to believe that either Li or Ye side with Google’s stand in the matter BUT I can’t pretend to know whether educated business leaders in China agree or disagree with their government’s policies related to Internet freedom.
* Cyber Attack on Baidu: Although we reported on the re-routing of Baidu’s web traffic to an alternate web page on January 12th, this relatively minor “attack” on the search giant quickly got forgotten by the end of the day when Google released its announcement about the attacks against its Gmail service. Nevertheless, Baidu was clearly embarrassed by the replacement of its homepage by the Iranian Cyber Army and has subsequently launched a lawsuit against US-based domain registrar, Register.com, which manages Baidu’s domain name servers (DNS). The cyber-attack wasn’t the result of an attack on Baidu’s servers but rather involved “external manipulation” of its DNS entries on Register.com. The lawsuit accuses Register.com of gross negligence that caused “serious damages” to the search engine’s business.

Despite the uncertainty of why these executives chose to leave at this time, there is certainly concern among investors that Baidu has some problems ahead of it in spite of the fact that it should be a great beneficiary of Google’s possible departure from the Chinese market. The company’s stock had shot up to $467.68 — a 52-week high — following the Google news but has fallen almost 11% since the latest resignation announcement on the 18th.

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Digital Economy Bill Seeks To Tackle Online Infringement And Domain Name Abuse

Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:20:00 +0000

Digital Economy Bill Seeks To Tackle Online Infringement And Domain Name Abuse

The Digital Economy Bill continues to create waves as its controversial provisions aimed at reducing online copyright infringement are revealed.

The draft Bill, published at the end of 2009 and due to become law by the summer of 2010 has receiving mixed reviews regarding its content. While the aims of the Government to reduce illegal file sharing have been generally welcomed, the provisions in their current draft form are facing some fierce criticism both in and out of Parliament. The criticism includes opposition to aspects of the Bill coming from Yahoo, eBay and Google.

Controversial New Power for Secretary of State

Following publication of the Bill the end of November, objections were raised by the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat parties regarding Clause 17 of the Bill which gives the Secretary of State the power to amend the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1977 for the purposes of preventing or reducing online infringements. However this right is restricted to circumstances where it is appropriate to do so due to "technical developments". More worryingly for the Government however, are the complaints that have also been received from internet giants Google, Yahoo and eBay regarding the controversial provision.

The criticism for the provision is that it allows the Secretary of State to change the law without the change being subject to the same level of Parliamentary scrutiny as would otherwise be the case for an ordinary amendment to primary legislation.

It is now thought that following the extent of the opposition to the provision, the clause may now need to be "watered down". At present it is unclear how far any revision would go, or whether the provision will be removed altogether.

Fighting Online Copyright Infringement

Among provisions of the Bill which have been more positively received include an obligation on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to take action against internet users who infringe copyright on a regular basis.

The Bill introduces two primary obligations on ISPs:-

1. ISPs must send a notification to their users who persistently use websites which have been reported by copyright owners as being used primarily to infringe copyright. Such a notification would be sent to an infringing user once they pass a threshold of visits to certain blacklisted sites. The notification sent to the user will be in the form of a "Copyright Infringement Report" which must contain key elements, such as advice on how to download music legally from the internet.
2. Secondly, ISPs must compile lists of its users who pass the threshold of visits to the blacklisted sites. Such lists could then be passed to copyright holders on an anonymous basis on request. This information could be used to by the copyright owners to firstly apply to the courts for disclosure of the names and addresses of those individuals on the list. Following disclosure, copyright owners would then be free to bring legal proceedings against those individuals for copyright infringement.

The government hopes that the measures will vastly reduce online copyright infringement due to users receiving direct warnings from their internet providers regarding their illegal online activity. However, in the event that further action is needed, the Bill contains a reserve power for the Secretary of State to introduce further provisions to tackle the problem.

The reserve power can be used by the Secretary of State to direct Ofcom to assess whether ISP's should be subject to further "technical obligations" should the problem of illegal file sharing not be reduced by a target of 70% by April 2011.

In the event that this milestone is not reached (which is thought to be probable) the "technical obligations" which Ofcom could introduce include the possibility that internet users could be cut off completely from using the internet. Persistent infringers could also see their internet access restricted or their connection speed reduced depending on the seriousness and frequency of the infringements.

To add another twist, the further measures that could be introduced by the reserve power have been criticised for possibly infringing users human rights. It has been suggested that monitoring and restricting users online activity, as contemplated by the Bill, could amount to a breach of individual's privacy and right to private life, protected by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It is yet to be seen whether such objections will amount to a revision of the provision or whether a direct challenge will be mounted once the Bill becomes law.

Domain Name Registrations

Among other changes that the Bill introduces, is a provision to give the Government the ability to intervene in domain name registration disputes and registrations. The new power would allow the Secretary of State to intervene in ".uk" domain name registrations where there has been a misuse of domain name registration procedures and the registry has failed to deal adequately with the abuse.

Presently ".uk" domain registrations and disputes are handled and resolved by Nominet, making the industry self-regulating. And while the Government has said that is keen to continue self-regulation of the industry, it has also expressed the desire to ensure that regulation of the industry is maintained at a high level of scrutiny and consistency.

In accordance with these aims, the Bill introduces a provision which will enable the Secretary of State to intervene in cases where the registry has been unable to satisfactorily resolve a domain name registration dispute or where further measures are deemed to necessary for the wider public benefit.

Such abuses in which the Secretary of State may intervene are thought to include cybersquating, misleading domain names or spamming.

Conclusion

The Government faces a difficult task to balance the competing rights associated with online copyright infringement and other technological advancements. While it must be seen to be acting upon the ever-growing problem of illegal file sharing and keep the law in the sector flexible, this flexibility may come at heavy price to users online freedom.

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