[humorix] The Mother Of All Lawsuits Filed Against Network Solutions

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

The Mother Of All Lawsuits Filed Against Network Solutions
Noah Morals, nomorals@i-want-a-website.com
May 17, 2000

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it's a
wonderful time to be a lawyer.  The epic struggle between
hackerdom and corporatedom is a win-win situation for us
litigators. If the wind is blowing one way, we can make
money filing lawsuits on behalf of Big Evil Yet Deep
Pocketed Corporations. If the wind shifts, we can still
make money defending the little guy against the corporate
tyrants. As I'm writing this, the wind is blowing towards
Virginia -- Network Solution's home state -- as the mother
of all trademark infringement lawsuits offers to make me
and my cohorts a whole lotta money. We're talking Bill
Gates money here, folks, and I'm celebrating.

In a recent court case, the judge upheld NetSol's claim
that they own their customer's domain names. It doesn't
take a Harvard Law School graduate (which I'm not) to
foresee the consequences: NetSol is the owner of every
single trademark-infringing domain in existence --
registered or unregistered!

My law firm, Rilley, Lowe & Morals, is on the case.  We're
filing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of every single
trademark holder in the US (and possibly the world)
alleging that, for every registered trademark, NetSol must
own some domain (registered or unregistered) that violates
it. Take RilleyLoweMorals.com, for example. We just
registered it with NetSol, but of course they claim
ownership of the domain according to a clause in their
license agreement printed in Flyspeck-3 font (my personal
favorite). That's a trademark infringement (or will be as
soon as we fill out the mountain of paperwork with the
USPTO), plain and simple. And that's just one domain out of
billions of possibilities.

We're licking our chops. This could be the biggest piece of
litigation in the history of the Universe.  Those poor
schmucks in 1849 all thought they could get rich panning
for gold... but the real money is found in America's
courtrooms. We've just struck the NetSol Lode. As
Metallica's head lawyer recently said, "Cha-ching!" (By the
way, he was my roommate at the Chattafoocheeble Downstairs
Discount Law School. For those of you wondering about my
stance on the Napster case: Whatever brings the greatest
gold to the greatest numbers of lawyers is a Good Thing(tm)
in my book.)

Now, some of you might be wondering about the strength of
our case. It's rock solid.  I can just hear the NetSol
weenie lawyers trying to argue in court, "But we can't
possibly own all unregistered  domains!" To which I'll
rebut, "What's the difference? If someone pays to register
a domain, does your ownership of it suddenly spring into
existence? Are your customers paying for the privilege of
creating intellectual property for NetSol's exclusive use
and benefit? If not, then you are liable for all
unregistered domains. If so, then you'll shortly be out of
business -- there's only so many suckers to go around, and
most of them have only GeoCities homepages without domain
names."

Stay tuned. If you own a trademark of any kind, you should
be receiving a snail mail with the subject "You might
already be a plaintiff!" within the next three months.
Unless you have any kind of moral objection (an unfortunate
weakness some humans possess) and wish to excluse yourself
from this class-action lawsuit, you'll be on the road to
riches.

And my law firm gets to keep 30%.  It's a wonderful time to
be a lawyer.

-
Humorix:      Linux and Open Source(nontm) on a lighter note
Archive:      http://humbolt.nl.linux.org/lists/
Web site:     http://www.i-want-a-website.com/about-linux/