[nknight]

You seem to be stuck on the idea that there's some sort of legally-enforceable trademark at issue, but you've provided no evidence of it. To even begin to claim a trademark, you must assert it, and I see no evidence of anyone asserting such a trademark. To actually enforce it in court, registration is required in the US and I'm sure at least some other countries.

You also have interpreted his statements as saying he will seek to harm the reputation of Scala, but his statements only imply that if you assume the worst about people. In other words, you're projecting.

[soc88]

Then maybe you should actually read the text.

Apart from that, registering multiple common scala-* domains and then making them point to his blog instead of something actually related to the topic is pretty much the definition of domain grabbing.

Sure, he can do it and figure out if he gets away with it. But in my opinion it is just ethically and morally wrong to register domains which with popular names which are expected to be used by Scala-related projects and keep them to punish the whole community for something a single person did.

[bigiain]

You realise you're sounding a lot like you've never had to deal with the problems of the effectively single dns namespace before?

Trademarks don't automatically apply to domain names - since ordinary trademarks apply to a narrow protection of people offering "that same type of goods or services". ("Generic" trademarks exists, but need t meet much wider standards of public recognition than Scala-as-a-programming-language has.)

Apart from trademark disputes, which "The Scala Community" have no chance of winning here, domain names have _always_ been first come first served. If _you_ thought scala-tools.org was a worthwhile asset, you should have registered it before he did. Same with any scala-* domain.

Feel free to get huffy about whether or not you think he should have done things differently, but trying to frame this as some sort of abuse of domain name ownership is, frankly, naive...

[soc88]

I have no idea what your problem is, but feel free to completely ignore what I have written and write down your ramblings instead. The net is big enough for everybody, right?