Judge Thomas Wingate
I will be first in line to remove Judge Thomas Wingate's stripes, rip off his epaulettes and break his sword. What a ludicrous decision. The man obviously does not live in the real world and should be suitably admonished.
Kentucky officials must return 141 gambling domain names they seized last year in a bid to block internet betting within state borders, an appeals court panel ordered on Tuesday. The 2-1 decision by Kentucky's Court of Appeals reverses a lower-court ruling giving state officials the authority to seize some of the world's most …
I wonder how many of these actually went offline (or went offline for more than a few minutes). I mean,, how many registrars are actually in Kentucky? In a few other cases, I thought I had read the registrar just cahnged the IP to point to some "UR site has been seized!!!" page, but since the registration was still in the owner's name they just moved it to another registrar and set it back up properly 8-).
Anyway, good that cluefulness prevailed. A domain is obviously not a gambling device.
...that someone, SOMEWHERE has some common damn sense about things on the internet. I agree with David's assessment of Wingate, that man needs to have the boots put to him, medium-style.
And whoever at ICANN approved this needs to be yanked. Seriously, isn't ICANN an international organization? They may be incorporated by US law. And doesn't this action violate their bylaws as seen here: http://www.icann.org/en/about/ ?
any website that think it is/might be breaking the law of any of the US of A states and still have its domain registration in the US of A. Then they deserve whatever problem they might get in the future.
for now, and since it have been proven that the seizure was erroneous, is the state going to pay, the owners of the domain, for the amount of money they (unjustifiably) lost since last year?
for all it's worth, I am still no happy about how the judgment was overturned. It wasn't because the seizure was illegal, it was because of the wording of the law. So if the wording is changed*, does that mean they will seize the domains again?
* reminder, this is the US of A, they can invade 2 countries and call it "liberation." There is no reason the believe they won't change the law for the fun of it.
...that some self-righteous, puffed-up windbag in some podunk state felt that he had the authority to prevent the casino owners from conducting their lawful business outside their borders.
If online gambling is illegal in a given state, then that state's judiciary has a variety of options open to it which don't involve exceeding their authority, or affecting those outside their jurisdiction.
For one, did they even ask the gambling sites' owners whether they wouldn't mind blocking Kentuckian IP addresses?
The appeals court ruled simply that domains are not gambling devices. The rights of Kentucky to dictate to the internet are not mentioned; only their rights to seizure. There is nothing to stop this same situation occurring again in the future with the domains seized under a different law.
I think you are missing the point. The ownership of the domains was changed. At that point, the original owners would have been unable to modify any of the DNS configuration that the new owner specified. For ownership to change back requires intervention by the applicable TLD management organisation.
I agree that the domains were probably only down as long as it took for the respective companies to purchase new names and set the DNS records. Bearing in mind that a DNS change can take up to 24 hours to propagate, an on the ball administrator could have had the new domains set up quickly enough that the site would have been available on some domain all the time. Add a mail-out to all your current users with the new URL and you're sorted.