Foundation Asks Kentucky Court to Uphold Domain Decision — Electronic Frontier
EFF and other organizations ask Kentucky Supreme Court to uphold lower court decision.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky filed a friend of the court brief with the Kentucky Supreme Court to uphold a lower court’s decision blocking the seizure of gambling domain names.
As stated by an EFF press release:
“No state can order a domain name registrar over which it does not have jurisdiction to do anything. The commonwealth simply hasn’t satisfied its burden here,” stated EFF Senior Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. “Without these notable protections, no website would be safe from arbitrary decisions by foreign courts to silence online content that they don’t like.”
“Under Kentucky’s legal theory, any government in the world would be able to seize any website domain name if the site has content that the government does not like,” stated John Morris, general counsel for CDT. “Such a theory, if upheld, would be devastating to free expression around the world.”
Indeed, we could see a Muslim country try to seize MakersMark.com and JimBeam.com. How would Kentucky feel regarding that?
The press release also mentions that EFF is joined by other organizations, counting the domain industry’s Internet Commerce Association.
