On 1/8/06, Jean-Baptiste Soufron jbsoufron@gmail.com wrote:
I am sorry to completely disagree :
Well, okay -- as I said, I didn't realize this was a problem and was curious. I didn't realize that one had to take out a trademark to get a .eu domain and soforth.
And since our next wikimania will be at Harvard Law School... what will you do when the WMF will have to explain it was not even able to secure the domain name of its main public event?
If we are talking about .com and .org, there will never be an explanation needed since everybody knows about cybersquatting. But this is a completely separate issue in these cases.
And please, explaining that you "cope" with typosquatting is nonsense. We're talking about a manifestation that will take place at Harvard Law School and that is likely to be our main event for the year to come. Many people will come to know us through this, and many more people are going to judge us through this.
Again, I don't think people care that much about things like domain addresses. The people at Harvard Law School certainly don't. Or if they do, we can always point them to harvardlaw.com, harvardlaw.org, and lawharvard.com. Typosquatting isn't new and even computer illiterate people generally know how to cope with it.
And explain me why not simply call it "wikiconf", "wikitruc", "wikimeeting" or "wikiwhatever". Then, we could make a proper registration on the tm and the domain names so that we will be able to secure and keep it safe so that the community can go on using it for years?
I'm of course completely in favor of securing something outright if that works and the name is good. I think though that it would be better to have an awkward domain name (and blame it on the internet) than to have an awkward conference name (which everyone will blame on us).
FF