ICANN has posted more litigation pleadings and orders from the Dotster v. ICANN litigation.

According to ICANNWatch, the litigation update was a response to requests on the General Assembly mailing list. Pool.com litigation documents are promised in the future. In an effort to get my mail under control, I unsubscribed from the GA list recently. If any news makes it way to that list first, please alert me.

I'm not sure I agree with this new post on Karl Auerbach's weblog: "Was ICANN involved in this?  There is no sign of it." I don't see why ICANN should be involved in the manner in which the root server operators deploy their servers. So long as the servers interoperate and coordinate with the master zone file -- and the announced change shouldn't affect those aspects of root server performace at all -- what would ICANN's role be? I don't have Karl's technical background, so I may be missing something, but what?

Later: Karl responds. Thanks!

Computer Business Review: Register.com Looking at Major Acquisition. Intriguing article but awfully short on facts.

According to a new poll, four out of five Americans disapprove of removing the Ten Commandments from the Alabama courthouse. What's not clear to me is whether this means that folks approve of having the government endorse a particular religious view or they simply believe that people in Alabama need to pay more attention to things like 'do not kill.' As a compromise though, why don't they just remove some of them. I can think of a couple of good candidates to excise from the tablets.

Those folks at GoDaddy crack me up. As advertised, this is sort of like selling "First Amendment" protection. When you create a new work, you earn a copyright in it. It's automatic. No fancy logos required. I guess that's why GoDaddy is trying to keep its customers from talking to someone who knows better: "Saves you the time, hassle and expense of an attorney's assistance." Sigh.

I don't mean to suggest that it's unreasonable to apply for a copyright registration on a particular work. It's not. But the Copyright Office provides all the information you need to do that. GoDaddy makes it sound as though the only way you have copyright protection is if you file for a registration. That's not the case, and the advertising for this new service strikes me as overly simplistic, if not outright deceptive.

Danny O'Brien explaining the BBC's announcement that it would make its archives available for free, public use: "The BBC's job isn't to make money out of ingenious intellectual property arrangements, or barging its way to take a share of a DRM-restricted viewing pot. Despite how it looks sometimes, the BBC isn't just another Fox or Warner Bros. The BBC's job - or part of it - is to distribute knowledge. " What a concept. And the fact that it seems a refreshing concept shows just how poorly other media sources are serving the public interest. PBS, the closest analog to the BBC we have in the United States, does a nice job at it, but the for-profit media companies are moving in the opposite direction. Surely even a for profit media venture would be well-served by also serving the public interest and the public domain. News has such a short shelf life. What does a company lose by giving its reports over to the public domain once they've lost their immediacy?

Howard Dean should pick up some 3/4 length jersey-style T-Shirts. It would make his life a lot easier. In every campaign photo I've seen over the last few weeks, he's had his sleeves rolled up.

SEC Filing by Register.com: "On August 15, 2003, we were contacted by a company with which we have recently held preliminary discussions regarding a potential strategic acquisition by us, inquiring whether we had an interest in pursuing such a transaction at this time. A transaction with this party would substantially increase the scale of our business...."

NetSol's pre-order page for back-ordered domain names just went up:

Pre-Orders for Next Registration Rights will be available until the service "goes live" (currently scheduled for October 27, 2003). When you place your pre-order you commit to purchasing the service should you receive the subscription. There is no guarantee that pre-orders will result in obtaining a Next Registration Rights subscription. When the service "goes live", if your credit card is valid at that time, your order will be submitted to the VeriSign registry on a first come first served basis. If the Next Registration Rights subscription you ordered is available, it will be automatically purchased for you. Your credit card on file will be charged $39 for each successful subscription. You will be notified via e-mail whether or not your order was successful.

I'm sure NetSol won't be the last registrar to offer pre-order back-orders.

If you click around the new site a little, you'll see that I haven't actually taken much of a blogging vacation this summer, I've just been sending my posts to a different place while I tested out some new blogging software for some friends. The software package is still in alpha release, but it's good enough now to use day to day. Over the next few weeks, I'll show you around and introduce some of the new features. First stop is setting up a reader account.

If you don't have a reader account and you're not logged in (and right now that's just about everyone), you'll see a menu choice at the top of the web page that reads "create a reader account | log in." If you click on that, you'll be taken to a page that will let you set up a new reader account. All it really requires is your name, time zone, and e-mail address. Once you've created a reader account, two new things will be possible: (a) you'll be able to subscribe to e-mail notifications about new posts to the icann.blog (and/or my main weblog, of which the icann.blog is now a subcategory); and (b) you'll be able to post comments to anything I write. Over time, I'll be adding more features to the site that make use of the reader accounts.

More on the new features in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, welcome back to my weblog.

Martin Schwimmer's parting shot on the Fox-Franken suit: " Clients come to us in part because of our judgment. If we are thinking 'In bringing this particular suit in this particular manner, the client exposes itself to risk greater than that of the complained-of act' and we do not communicate that thought effectively to the client, then we are cheating the client."

Marty is one of the good guys, not at all the sort of trademark lawyer I once wrote about in this piece, "Cease and Desist."

This one comes courtesy of ICANNWatch: The Joy of "Pre-Ordering".

Apparently all the planets have to align properly to enable music transfers on the Sony NetMD. Today I encountered yet another problem. Because the Sony NetMD is not compatible with Macintosh, I burned some of the songs I had purchased from the Apple Music Store to a CD. I then placed the CD into my PC to use the Sony software to upload the songs to the NetMD. That works just fine with commercial CDs. Doesn't work with a custom-made CD though. The software chokes after about 15 seconds. Once again, I blame the lawyers.

Looks like Verisign and Network Solutions are moving ahead to implement WLS. Link via Rick Wesson on the Registrars' list.

This is awfully interesting. It provides a little background on this resolution from last week's ICANN Board meeting.

Here are a few good reasons why someone might choose not to make an RSS feed available.
(1) They want the intelligence that comes with crunching and reading server logs. In the early days of running my icann.blog, I took great interest in knowing how many unique visitors were stopping by, how often, and what they were reading most. With RSS, you know who is subscribing, but that's not the same as reading. My aggregators bring in a lot of articles, but when I'm pressed for time, I simply mark them as read without actually reading them. Serving a web page to anyone other than a bot though is usually a good sign that something on the page has been read.
(2) They might not want their content aggegated into a separate web page. For the reasons noted in (1), I was initially a little wary of allowing my articles to show up in the ICANN Blog Aggregator. At the end of the day, I reasoned it really didn't matter and having all of the icann-related web content show up in a single place was much more convenient. Others might go the other way though.
(3) They want advertising revenue from ad serves. With Google's AdWords and other services geared toward small publishers, you can now generate a modest revenue flow from a weblog or personal publishing site. Unless you can find a way to push the ad out via RSS -- and I think there's a good idea somethere in that thought -- you'd rather force people to the web to get the ad served than let them have the headline or content for free.

I have recordings of the recent Senate hearing archived on the web site under a new "Audio" category. The first file (http://www.lextext.com/senate31july2003.mp3 | 21.8 megs) contains the presentation of the prepared statements and the second file (http://www.lextext.com/senateQA-31july2003.mp3 | 14.3 megs) contains the Question and Answer session. Not much happened.

Whoever named this theme "olive" is obviously working on a Mac. It looks black, white and grey on my PCs, but the richer and more subtle color variations come through clearly on the Macintosh. It looks great on both systems though. Kudos to the design team. It's the best yet.

"Fox spokesman Paul Schur said the network was considering its options." You'd think those options would include firing the nincompoop who approved filing this suit.

According to the State Department, I'm supposed to steer clear of large crowds in Tunisia: "In light of recent demonstrations protesting U.S. policy toward Iraq, the U.S. Embassy recommends that Americans exercise particular caution at this time, and avoid areas where large crowds are gathered." And avoid soccer games too.

Brought to you by the venue for the upcoming ICANN meeting in Carthage, Tunisia. God it looks like Daniel, must be the clouds in my eyes...

It's bad form to use the e-mail address you requested when I gave you money two days ago to ask for more money today.

Meanwhile, Christopher Lydon has audio links to recent Dean stump speeches.

Larry Lessig: "Lobbying is increasingly the way competition is waged in America."

Great quote about Microsoft from Sterling Ball: "We won't do business with someone who treats us poorly."

Chris Null reviews 29 Palms, now out on DVD, and gets some fan mail from the film's Producer Bryan Lord.

I may be the only poor sop around who would choose to listen to Bruce Tonkin and the Councilors while at the gym, but that was what I had hoped to put on the Mini-Disc for today's workout. Sony had a different view though. I've previously written about my problems using the NetMD Mini-Disc Recorder/Player to record and upload original material, but today I discovered a completely different problem. When trying to move the Names Council recording from my laptop to the Sony Mini-Disc, I received a message that I can only upload 16 bit audio at 44.1Khz. Huh? Why does the linking software or Mini-Disc care how my mp3 file is encoded? I can only suspect that it has something to do with the IP Constituency.

So I listened to Dave Alvin instead.