Blogging from ISPA iWeek - Part 2

Nick Wenban-Smith, Senior Legal Counsel at Nominet UK from gave an enlightening talk about domain name disputes. He mentioned a few interesting cases. In one case, a cyber squatting company registered Harrods.com. Harrods, instead of going through a dispute process, decided to sue straight away. Judgment was made against the cyber squatters, with costs! Considering what Harrods lawyers must cost, this led to the cyber squatters having to liquidate.

In another case, a Brit innocently registered itunes.co.uk before Apple launched its iTunes service. Apple decided to strong arm the guy by sending threatening letters. He got highly peeved by this and tried to sell to Napster! Although I like the way he gave Apple the finger, the courts didn't. It could now be shown that itunes.co.uk was an 'abusive' registration, and not an 'innocent' registration.

The (in)famous Rudolph Muller presented some interesting findings from a recent Broadband Survey. Although it appears customers are happy with the service they are getting from ISPs, they are not happy with the service received from Telkom. He also raised the concern that ISPs might have become accustomed to the monopolistic Telkom landscape and built business models accordingly. I suspect this is a bit like a frog being slowly boiled: Jumping out of the pot might cause enough shock to kill it!

Beaunard Grobler from the SAPS Cybercrime Unit gave a talk about fighting cybercrime in South Africa. It appears they are making good progress battling child porn, Nigerian 419 scams and Phishing crimes. He did admit that they are short-staffed and have problems retaining staff. I think most cybercrime these days is related to industrial espionage and is causing millions of Rands worth of damage to companies, large & small. Let's hope the SAPS expands this division dramatically.