-----Original Message----- From: Dean Anderson <dean@av8.com> To: Tim Salo <salo@networkcs.com> Cc: nanog@merit.edu <nanog@merit.edu> Date: Thursday, September 03, 1998 1:41 PM Subject: Re: Director Database Marketing (Herndon VA US) (http://www.saic.com/career/jobs/c5

...

o Is focused on whether the whois database is within the purview of the Privacy Act of 1974, but doesn't directly address the ownership of the whois database;

o Doesn't discuss the relevance of the FARs, which explicitly talk about the ownership rights of government contractors; and

o Says that the NSF asserts that NSI owns the whois database.

Actually, I just read Karls page. The NSF just says it doesn't maintain the database and that the database Karl refers to is maintained by NSI, and therefore NSF isn't subject to or can't respond to Privacy Act requests on this particular database. (The implication here being that NSI might still be) Perhaps that is true.

I would think that all people interested in the legal issues of the Registry Industry would want to study these documents closely. http://name.space.xs2.net/law/answers/ In my opinion, the declaration by George Strawn of the NSF is very misleading. He spends a lot of time pointing out minutia, fails to mention significant history, and then draws conclusions based on technical FUD. Some of the other letters from Don Mitchell of the NSF are also critical to the history here. Don Mitchell works at the NSF for George Strawn. He has been the Program Manager for the InterNIC contracts. It is clear that he has been one of the primary people responsible for the delays in adding new TLDs to the legacy Root Name Servers. Don Mitchell has been responsible for a variety of actions which favor NSI. For example, at one point NSI took over the IS tasks of the InterNIC from General Atomics. Part of that activity was the Network Scout. When NSI needed to divest itself of the costs of the Network Scout to prepare for their IPO, Don Mitchell approved a $3,000,000 NSF grant on the day that the Network Scout was terminated. It remained on the InterNIC web site. This was essentially an indirect $3M grant to NSI which did not have to show up on the books of NSI as additional funding. http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/showaward?award=9712163 http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/showaward?award=9218749 The NSF has an annual budget of over $3.8 BILLION dollars. With that amount of money they can easily manipulate industries that depend on intellectual property. The Congress continues to allow them to do this with apparently no concern about the negative impacts on society. Apparently, members of Congress do not understand the fragile nature of intellectual property or the service and software based economy that we now have. If they did, they would not allow the 900 lb. NSF gorrilla to run free in these fragile industries. Jim Fleming Unir Corporation - http://www.unir.com