At 5/18/02 2:56 PM, George Kirikos wrote: >Not by any means. It creates an additional cost to those suffering from >the abuse to acquire that information. Suppose it costs $5,000 to get a >subpoena from a court to get the WHOIS info (not to mention the time >involved). This imposes a big cost on a party who is already suffering
Yes. That's the way legal systems work. If you want to sue someone, it costs you money and/or time (although it costs nothing like $5,000 just to discover someone's identity). UDRP proceedings, which -- like it or not -- are the usual way to deal with domain ownership disputes, would cost no more if the information was not public, assuming the UDRP companies had access to the database. >For negligible costs, they can have someone else represent their >registrations, and be accountable for behaviour originating from their >domains. I've done that in the past for clients of mine, for free, and >suffered not one bit. You've agreed to become legally responsible for the actions of your clients? Hmmm. I would consider that an imprudent thing for a business owner to do. It's also imprudent for a registrant to give up his rights to someone else. >There's a balance between competing interests. If you told them that >they would find it much harder to track down website operators who've >defrauded them, or committed other improper acts, and that it imposes >higher costs on law enforcement and other legitimate users of the >information, their opinion might change. You could use the same argument to make the identity public of every person who performs any potentially liability-inducing act. For example, the same logic supports making public the identity of every dog owner in case his or her dog bites someone, or making the identity of every car owner public in case he parks in your driveway. Anyway: a business out to defraud people is probably not going to use a real address in their WHOIS information. To hearken back to an old argument on this list, this is why identity-validating certificates were invented -- so you know who you're doing business with and that they have been validated by a third party (although I have my doubts about the effectiveness of that validation), rather than just trusting the business to tell you the truthabout who they are. You get no such assurance with WHOIS information, public or otherwise. Anyone could set up a fraudulent business right now that says "George Kirikos" in the WHOIS. Should people sue you based on that? There's a reason it's difficult to sue people and that discovery costs money; having the WHOIS public on the theory that it's somehow legally authoritative and saves people from spending lots of money on legal discovery is unrealistic (Derek's efforts to fix that notwithstanding). >It's not their medical >information that is being made public, but some basic contact >information of themselves or an agent. It is still a great issue for many customers. >As long as these can be provided at low cost, I could live with that. >But, the prevailing attitude of folks I've talked to seems to be that >it wouldn't be. I don't see why not. It's a trivial problem in most cases (such as giving UDRP investigators access to the databases and releasing it by automation to other registrars for transfers). The only potentially "expensive" case for registrars I can think of is the case where they have to verify that a subpoena is legitimate (for a bona fide legal proceeding resulting in subpoenas that isn't handled through the UDRP), but I can't believe there are many of those. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies "The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was."
