I liked the use of the "whack a mole" analogy. Here (for those who don't know) is how this industrial-scale counterfeiting scam works:
1. Set up OSCommerce or Magento site with design roughly copied from legit rights owner.
2. Get local 'middleman' to donate paypal account in return for small cut
3. Buy a bucket load of adwords
4. Run massive scale xrumer / scrapebox / etc 'SEO' campaign
5. Repeat thousands of times over
Getting domains de-indexed via the DMCA process on Google, never mind taking after-the-fact legal action, is just treating the symptoms.
Given that Paypal and Google are at the forefront of this issue, they are where the responsibility lies in terms of preventing the sites from transacting: by denying them a payment method and heaps of traffic respectively. I am sure that both companies are working hard on this issue, but having looked at the problem over the past couple of years, it hasn't always seemed to be that much of a priority.
Beyond that it is basically a question of international trade treaties and better local law enforcement in the territories where the offenders operate (predominately China) - i.e. NOT an easy fix.
You can understand the frustration of rights owners who are obviously going to take every opportunity to use legal action domestically. If they get a fairly tech illiterate decision in their favour that has potential dangerous consequences for the internet at large, then this is as much because they are just swinging at everything (back to those moles) than any great desire on their part to restrict legitimate rights and freedoms.
Finally, it is important to realise that this is not a victimless crime. What brought this home to me was a few years back when I overheard a nurse in the neonatal unit my son was being looked after in at the time excitedly talking about a pair of brand name boots she'd bought on the internet.
I realised that she had absolutely no clue they were fake because why should she? She had found the legitimate-looking site on the first page of Google and had paid with Paypal.
This was not a transaction carried out 'out the back of a van', where caveat emptor might more readily apply. A lot (majority?) of consumers don't realise that for all the brand loyality they might have in respect of Google and Paypal, etc^, they are services that are easily misused by unrelated third parties and so should not be taken as any sort of 'trust mark' in they way that shopping in large well-known department store does.
^Amazon and eBay deserve honourable mentions as being popular conduits for counterfeit scams too (although eBay in particular deserves a lot of credit for taking the subject more seriously than most).
Finally, it is important to realise that this is not a victimless crime. What brought this home to me was a few years back when I overheard a nurse [] excitedly talking about a pair of brand name boots she'd bought on the internet.
"Hardworking baby nurse falls for scam on the internet."
ZOMG That's one of the stupidest justifications for fucking up DNS and censoring the Internet that I've ever heard.
A lot (majority?) of consumers don't realise that for all the brand loyality they might have in respect of Google and Paypal, etc^, they are services that are easily misused by unrelated third parties and so should not be taken as any sort of 'trust mark' in they way that shopping in large well-known department store does.
The nurse controlling your preemie's heart rate monitor is too stupid to know the difference between Google and Nordstrom's.
Oh give me a fucking break.
I had a preemie too. Those nurses are all sharp as tacks. She knew exactly what she was doing.
Read the comment again dude. Never suggested that this (or similar) judgements are worth it. Also, I asked her, she didn't. Nor do the hundreds of thousands of other people who fall for these scams. Fact is though, unless the tech companies that are de facto facilitating these scams don't become better at preventing them, these judgements (and the sort of scary legislation that get proposed to deal with it) will become more common.
If the cheaper one has nearly all the same physical properties and a vastly better price, she didn't care very much if it was a "genuine" article. Nurses are very utilitarian.
Now you can believe that is a good way or a bad way to think, but it's not a problem that's going to be significantly improved by having the legal system DNS-jacking .com and trying to censor the internet.
tech companies that are de facto facilitating these scams
As if there were no scams before the "tech companies" came along to facilitate them.
Yes, there probably are businesses and business models that are threatened by a post-information-scarcity world. But whole societies are threatened by censorship.
But, more immediately and directly, the security of critical infrastructure like DNS (and our networks that depend on it) is threatened by these attempts to kink around with it.
1. Set up OSCommerce or Magento site with design roughly copied from legit rights owner. 2. Get local 'middleman' to donate paypal account in return for small cut 3. Buy a bucket load of adwords 4. Run massive scale xrumer / scrapebox / etc 'SEO' campaign 5. Repeat thousands of times over
Getting domains de-indexed via the DMCA process on Google, never mind taking after-the-fact legal action, is just treating the symptoms.
Given that Paypal and Google are at the forefront of this issue, they are where the responsibility lies in terms of preventing the sites from transacting: by denying them a payment method and heaps of traffic respectively. I am sure that both companies are working hard on this issue, but having looked at the problem over the past couple of years, it hasn't always seemed to be that much of a priority.
Beyond that it is basically a question of international trade treaties and better local law enforcement in the territories where the offenders operate (predominately China) - i.e. NOT an easy fix.
You can understand the frustration of rights owners who are obviously going to take every opportunity to use legal action domestically. If they get a fairly tech illiterate decision in their favour that has potential dangerous consequences for the internet at large, then this is as much because they are just swinging at everything (back to those moles) than any great desire on their part to restrict legitimate rights and freedoms.
Finally, it is important to realise that this is not a victimless crime. What brought this home to me was a few years back when I overheard a nurse in the neonatal unit my son was being looked after in at the time excitedly talking about a pair of brand name boots she'd bought on the internet.
I realised that she had absolutely no clue they were fake because why should she? She had found the legitimate-looking site on the first page of Google and had paid with Paypal.
This was not a transaction carried out 'out the back of a van', where caveat emptor might more readily apply. A lot (majority?) of consumers don't realise that for all the brand loyality they might have in respect of Google and Paypal, etc^, they are services that are easily misused by unrelated third parties and so should not be taken as any sort of 'trust mark' in they way that shopping in large well-known department store does.
^Amazon and eBay deserve honourable mentions as being popular conduits for counterfeit scams too (although eBay in particular deserves a lot of credit for taking the subject more seriously than most).