Re: [ga] Mr. Qaddafi Salutes Verisign

["William S. Lovell" <wsl@cerebalaw.com>]

Not this post of Joseph's in particular, but in general there seems to
be some confusion here as to the relevant law. There are two aspects
involved, which are (a) import/export regulations that relate to particular
types of goods and services, whether they are under the jurisdiction
of Commerce or Defense, etc; and (b) proscriptions on doing business
with country X at all, without regard to the nature of the goods
or
services (there also being, of course, humanitarian exceptions).

A page of mine at http://www.cerebalaw.com/export.htm has links to
good Import/Export sources, and having once been General Counsel
to a small company that had a lot of foreign sales, I got to be quite
familiar with them.  Technically, everything that ships out of this
country needs an export license (and that includes mere information
-- I cannot file a patent application in a foreign country for a client
without having an export license), and the way the proscribed countries
show up in those regs is that as to them, you just can't get an export
license (these are generally also the ones that are under the jurisdiction
of Defense rather than Commerce,e.g., crypto systems are "weapons"
and hence are controlled by Defense.).

(The goods I dealt with were those laser pointers presently being
used by the Special Forces to pinpoint targets for bombing, and
also those night vision glasses that give you those green pictures.)

Point is, whether or not embargoes against Cuba should be dropped
(yes they should -- that whole "sanctions' theory has been proven
over again and again not to work) and that kind of thing, have nothing
whatever to do with what the status of the law is right now, as to
doing business with "terrorist" countries. It must be ensured that those
laws as they now exist are obeyed.

Treaties are doable. GATT and the TRIPS agreement, the Uruguay
Round, and all that, show that in a treaty context involving a real,
living, breathing government, rather than some presumptive,
upstart creator of its own laws, and the devil take the hindmost,
accords can be reached, and where it has to, the U.S. can be
quite accommodating.  (We now have this dumb thing called the
provisional patent application, which got into U. S. law by way
of those treaties, and hundreds of foreign copyright owners (who
happen mostly to have been the French) whose registrations had
been lost under U. S. law, were given the opportunity to have
those copyrights reinstated.)

Let us not judge the U. S. on the basis of ICANN. In particular, the
ICANN pretense to be making international law by its various "policies"
needs to be crushed -- its role in that area is simply to obey U. S. law.
It lacks the power to "be more international" as Joseph requests.

William S. Lovell

Joseph wrote:

Hi Dr. John Berryhill,

I'm afraid I do not know enough nor have enough history of subject to answer
these questions.
>From a layman position, I think ICANN should be more international than what
it is currently legally binded to.

>>> Then would you agree to reversing the result of every UDRP decision
where a non-US registrant was found to have engaged in cybersquatting on the
basis of a US trademark?
*** My personal position is the rights of individuals. But that is a
different story. Suffice to say that I feel that there are room for
improvements in the current UDRP.

>>> It would seem to be a relative no-brainer that if ICANN is going to
engage itself in establishing a policy relating to aspects of national civil
law, then ICANN should CERTAINLY have a higher priority for establishing a
policy relating to the CRIMINAL law of the United States.
*** From a legal aspect this is true.

regards,
- Joseph
==============

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