Re: What *are* they smoking?

[Marc Slemko <marcs () znep com>]

On Mon, 15 Sep 2003, Alex Lambert wrote:

> "The information provided through the VeriSign Services is not
> necessarily complete and may be supplied by VeriSign's commericial
> licensors, advertisers or others."
>
> There's something immoral about *shoving it down our throats*, then,
> VeriSign.

Nice terms of service at http://sitefinder.verisign.com/terms.jsp :

        The VeriSign Services are provided only for your personal and
        non-commercial use. You are not authorized to modify, copy, display,
        transmit, license, create derivative works from, transfer, distribute
        or sell any information, software, products or services obtained
        from the services VeriSign provides through this web site. You may
        not "meta-search" the VeriSign Services. If you want to make
        commercial use of the VeriSign Services, you must enter into an
        agreement with us to do so in advance.

so... umh... I can't display any information from their website.

And can only use it for non-commercial use.

So... if I make a DNS query for some "commercial" purpose (whatever that
means), and get a response and then connect to that IP on port 80
and send a request, and get a redirect to this sitefinder.verisign.com
site, and follow it...  I'm violating their terms of use.

Does the contract under which NSI is operating .com and .net require that
people be able to use the results of their queries for non-personal and
commercial use?  It is a little fuzzy how directly you can relate the DNS
response to the terms of use on the website you get redirected to on the
legal level, but it seems that since Verisign is operating it with the
intent that people entering unknown domains into a webbrowser get
redirected there, then they are by implication stating that people doing
things for non-personal or commercial purposes must never enter such
names.

Sure, it is a ridiculous terms of use that wouldn't be likely to hold up
very well, but would the fact that they are making that claim have any
implication on if they are meeting the stated or implied terms of their
contract with ICANN?