Little-known U.S. law penalizes fake info on domain name registrations


My column from last year:

http://news.com.com/2010-1028-5155054.html
The U.S. Congress is hard at work trying to punish Internet users who 
value their privacy.
That's not how Capitol Hill politicians describe a new bill introduced 
last week, of course, but that's what it would accomplish if it becomes law.
Called the Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act, the measure would 
increase prison sentences by up to seven years in criminal cases if 
someone provided "material and misleading false contact information to a 
domain name registrar, domain name registry, or other domain name 
registration authority." That's a reference to the Whois database that 
lists information about who owns each domain name. [...]

-Declan



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: FOISA is law.
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 00:17:19 -0500
From: Tom Cross <tom@memestreams.net>
To: declan@well.com

Declan,

	I found out today that the "Federal Online Identity Sanctions Act,"
which you wrote about in February of last year is now the law of the
land. It was melded into the "Intellectual Property Protection and
Courts Amendments Act" and passed in December. There was hardly a peep
about this in the press and other usual outlets. Just a short blurb in
one of EPIC's newsletters.
	This law creates significant risks for people who run websites that
they might commit some sort of Intellectual Property thoughtcrime and
find themselves facing willful infringement charges simply because they
gave a fake phone number on their DNS registration. Its hard to see
what purpose this serves in terms of Internet crime. Criminals usually
don't need domain names, and its doubtful that this law is going to
influence them to be forthcoming with contact information when they do
use them.
	What is most frustrating to me about it is this "savings clause" it
includes which says that nothing about this law impacts the freedom of
speech. Nothing about that clause mitigates the actual risks that this
law creates for people engaged in protected speech online, or the
impact that it may have on what is said by whom. It simply provides for
a silly semantic argument that the government can make if faced with a
constitutional challenge. "The emperor is fully clothed, your honor!
See, it says so right here!" I find it disheartening to see fundamental
constitutional rights shrugged away with such trite wordsmithery.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:H.R.3632:

Regards,
Tom Cross
Posted by Declan McCullagh on Mar 30, 2005 in category privacy