[thelist] Who owns SW? Was:Difference between domain registrars

Judah McAuley judah at wiredotter.com
Fri Mar 26 10:22:21 CST 2004


Ken Moore wrote:
> Chris wrote:
> 
>> I realize that "ownership" is a very tricky subject when it comes to 
>> the world of computers and most companies like to think that the 
>> things you buy from them are actually only licensed to you and not 
>> owned by you.
> 
> 
> Court cases have ruled against this position. Renting and/or leasing 
> involve regular payments for a set period of time. The courts have 
> consistently ruled that this is not the case with most SW. They have 
> ruled like Borland International has always said in their "like a book" 
> liscense. It is like a book. If you want to remove the SW from your PC 
> and sell it, that is your right.
> 
> The arbitrary re-definiton of the term does not stand up.

That's all well and good, but to put it back in the context of the 
original question, domain names do involve regular payments for a set 
period of time, so they may be considered to be "leases" rather than 
something is bought outright. A further question, though, is that if 
domain names are leased by an individual, who are they actually owned 
by? Is it the Registrar? Is it ICANN? One problem is that in most 
instances the thing which you are leasing does not exist until you 
request it. So a product is being created specifically for you...but its 
not clear where the product is created and residing. Leasing other forms 
of intellectual property (say licensing an image) is more straight 
forward. An individual creates a work. It is distinct and copyright 
rests in the hands of the creator. The creator allows a licensee to use 
the property under terms of an agreement. But who is creating a domain 
name? Is it the IETF which created the RCF for DNS? Is the person who 
came up with the domain name as a new (and copyrightable I might add) 
idea? Is it the Registrar who created a text file on their machines with 
zone information that gets shared and transferred to other root servers?

Non-trivial questions. In the absence of settled rules on such things, I 
simply advise people to take a look at the TOS for their registrar and 
go with one that has the least restrictive rules and gives you the 
broadest rights. They will be least likely to give you grief when you 
need to do something with the domain later.

Judah



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