Ehrlich on Washington column, January 24, 2000

NEWS FROM Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr Second Congressional District of Maryland 1 40 7 York Road, Suite 304 3 1 5 Cannon House Office Building Lutherville, Maryland 2 1 093 Washington, D.C. 205 1 5 EHRLICH ON WASHINGTON Week of January 24, 2000 By Congressman Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr. ANTI-CYBERSQUATTING: PREVENTING INTERNET MISCHIEF As many holiday on-line users recently discovered, the Internet offers new and exciting opportunities for individuals to explore, learn, research, and even shop on the information superhighway. This new technology, however, is also vulnerable to abuse. Such is the case with individuals who register trademark names, such as www.warnerbros.com, and seek to pressure the actual Warner Bros. Company to purchase the rights to this Internet address for $350,000. This wrongful profiteering motivated my Congressional colleagues and I to adopt Senate bill 1255, the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, which bars inappropriate naming of Internet addresses and provides statutory civil criminal causes of action against wrongdoers. Two poignant examples were discussed during the debate on this bill — one, a pornographic website registered under the name www.dosney.com, and two, the registration of www.911porsche.com to an Australian company not in the automotive business. In the first example, the website owner apparently wishes to draw upon the close proximity of "dosney" to "disney" to bring traffic to the website where, with one click, one is led to graphic pornographic