• Domains

Conservatory Practice for CAcert Domains

The following is our current practice for our Members to hold our Domains, as approved m20100829.7

Agreement

As a holder of a CAcert Domain, you agree to the following:

1. A CAcert domain has the term "cacert" or similar somewhere in it.
2. On behalf of the Community, CAcert Inc owns its intellectual property including its brand, name, etc. All rights reserved.
3. You may hold and use a CAcert domain under this agreement.

4. The domain may only be used for CAcert-related purposes, and must reflect well on the name and reputation of CAcert (see Principles).

5. You must be at least an Assured Member.
6. You must register on page at wiki.cacert.org/Domains (below).
7. if you decide to release the domain, you agree to offer it to the Community for takeover first.
8. CAcert Inc retains the right to transfer any CAcert domain to CAcert Inc, for cost of transfer fee only.

9. Any disputes that arise under this agreement are referred to DRP.

Registry of Conservators

Domain holders: please add your details to the below.

Comments!

If you have a comment on this, please add it here:

• by Gereon Stein, holder of cacert.de: While the agreement set forth above is entirely sensible, it may prove difficult to retain certain rights to domain names in countries where CAcert does not (yet) hold a registered brand name. Even with a registered brand name, claiming a domain name from someone else usually requires legal action and is an enterprise with uncertain outcome to say the least. That said, a process should be put in place to ensure that domain names that an individual holder wishes to release will be taken over by either another supporter or CAcert to avoid any sort of domain grabbing by uncontrollable third parties. Some ccTLDs are expensive to hold but difficult to deal with if the respective domain name is lost.

  • Iang: yes, this is technically true, but registration of the brand name is a smaller part of the overall equation. Firstly, our Conservatory programme is oriented to all of our Community, who work to within our claims on the name (whether the name is registered or not is irrelevant to us). Secondly, most reputable business around the world will not knowingly infringe on a brand. So the fact that they know -- by means of all these domains above and simple things like google searches -- will solve all the "reputable, knowable" possibilities. What is left is the ratbags who want to leach off the reputation of CAcert, however it is done. Typically this would be page-ranking scams, etc. Those threats require hard work to deal with, and "registrations" aren't going to make much difference. Registrations tend to make the most difference when two large ventures accidentally rely on their brand over some time, and one must give up. But this is very rare in the Internet world, where the .com domain is the supreme brand registry.

  • Iang: On the second point of release: yes, exactly, see the cacert.eu domain above. It was offered, but nobody took it up, and is now being held by the registry. If anything, that case did help us to the current point of having an agreement, so the domain may be lost, but the opportunity was not!

  • dirk: Status updated 2011-10-04 ...

Notes on history