Open Society Institute, a think tank and foundation founded by billionaire George Soros, has lost a domain name dispute over the domain OpenSociety.org.

The majority of the three person National Arbitration Forum found that the domain name wasn’t registered and used in bad faith. Two of the panelists found that the domain was confusingly similar to the Open Society Institute mark and that the owner didn’t have rights or legitimate interests in the domain name. One panelist, Neil Anthony Brown, found against Open Society Institute on all three UDRP factors.

The saving grace for the domain owner appears to be that he registered several other “open” domain names, including openeconomy.org, openpolitics.org, and openpolicy.org. This lends credence to the idea that he viewed the domain name as generic.
The respondent in the case did an informal survey to find out if people identified “Open Society” with Soros’ institute, and found that the majority did not.

Originally, Open Society Institute contacted the domain registrant about purchasing the domain name. The domain registrant responded that he would need a six figure offer to consider selling it. That triggered the UDRP filing.

Photo: Copyright by World Economic Forum. swiss-image.ch/Photo by Sebastian Derungs. Creative Commons.

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Last week Google launched its new Gmail Priority Inbox feature to great fanfare. It’s a fantastic feature for people suffering from email overload.

I have another suggestion for Gmail. Usage of web-based email services has exploded to the point that many people and companies keep critical information in their hosted inboxes. This has led to some high profile security breaches.

I propose “secure inbox”, an added layer of security for important emails. These emails would require an additional password to be entered in order to view the email.

For example, you might have an email that includes your stock brokerage login and password. If someone got access to your Gmail account they could then get access to your brokerage account. But by clicking a button you could password protect the brokerage email, meaning that someone who compromises your inbox can’t access this sensitive email without cracking another password.

Perhaps it could also include two factor authentication such as sending a text to your email when a sensitive email is viewed. You could also set certain types of emails to automatically be password protected, such as trade confirmations from your broker, password reset emails, or bank statements.

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A couple months ago I wrote about how GoDaddy had snagged x.co with plans to use it as a URL shortener. Late last week I noticed that @Godaddy was using x.co in its tweets; and now the service is officially open to all.

x.co has a lot of the features you’ll find in most URL shorteners, such as robust analytics. You can easily create an x.co link by pasting a longer URL in at x.co.

GoDaddy has been pushing .co domains and x.co will help give it visibility. At the bottom of the x.co page is a search box to get your own .co domain.

Speaking of which, rather than use x.co for link shortening you should think about creating your own. .Co is a great domain to register for a link shortener because there are still plenty of short ones available. Right now I use dnw.com as a link shortener, but I also own dnw.co, which is even shorter.

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