Whose era is it anyway?
Newcomer to the gTLD name game, .Free is promising free domains to everybody – once the gTLD gets approved by ICANN. The process of going live might take months but the Czech Republic company already offers pre-registrations for domains.
That sounds a lot like selling lots on the surface of the Moon.
Copy for free - but you might get in trouble when caught.
As Domain Incite has pointed out, however, the .Free guys went on a copying spree, freely lifting entire chunks of text created for the very successful launch campaign of the .Co TLD.
Where is the domain industry heading to, when companies that aspire to become registries cannot write their own copy?
Check out for example, these two passages:
The new era of .CO has arrived!
The Launch Plan incorporated industry best practices as well as other innovative rights protection mechanisms designed to protect the users of the .CO Top Level Domain.
The .FREE era is coming.
The Launch Plan incorporates industry best practices as well as other innovative rights protection mechanisms designed to protect the users of the .FREE gTLD.
These are not plain plagiarisms, they are copy/paste jobs by a new company that evidently lacks creativity and attempts to steal the thunder and fame of the very successful .Co Registry!
Another example can be seen in the Founders program, compare:
The .Co Founders Program – Original
The .CO Founders Program is an initiative designed to engage early adopters, also known as .CO Founders, to proactively develop and maintain domains with the .CO extension prior to the public launch in July 2010. This is a tremendous opportunity for applicants to secure memorable domain names and get a jump on the competition by developing their .CO domains before the masses.
The .Free Founders Program – Copy
The .FREE Founders Program is an initiative designed to engage early adopters, also known as .FREE Founders, to proactively develop and maintain domains with the .FREE extension prior to the public launch. This is a tremendous opportunity for applicants to secure memorable domain names and get a jump on the competition by developing their .FREE domains before the masses.
Come on, .Free guys. That’s a complete rip-off. It’s wrong, plain and simple and it will get you in legal hot waters with the .Co Registry – guaranteed. Change this mess right now – and that’s some .Free advice.
Dude, this is some crazy stuff. It looks like they did a lot of copy and paste, word for word.
The .co guys are aware of this. I seriously doubt there’s any “legal” problem here. A polite email will probably do the trick.
Free?? ha ha…now that totally BS
I guess you’ve got to keep costs down until ICANN actually approves your TLD. Let’s face it, co did an excellent job, and the timing was right. .Free is a very intriguing proposition. Domainincite did a great job of extracting info from the .free guys.
Pete – CTRL-C/CTRL-V looks like it
Kevin – Still, there’s no excuse for such blatant ripping of promotional material. These guys aren’t some teenage bloggers, they are starting a registry! You did a great job spotting and calling them out.
The Dot Free guys have removed the infringing content after receiving a stern warning from the .Co Registry.