Trust on the internet is a big issue: we’re able to communicate with people all over the globe, yet we don’t really know anything about the other person besides their own word. From ebay scammers, to people who fake their deaths, to internet predators, there is a lot out there. In the textbook (Ethics for the Information Age) Quinn talks about Katie Tarbox’s story and how her assailant, 41-year old Francis Kufrovich was the “first person in the United States to be sentenced for Internet pedophilia”. Wanting to have more details on the story, and wanting to know what happened to Katie after her ordeal, I googled her story. A quick read of her wikipedia page shows that she wrote a book – Katie.com. Which is awesome, it must have helped her with the healing process along with actually letting her make some money from the horrible event. However the wiki also mentions that the actual domain name katie.com was already registered and owned by another Katie, Katie Jones since 1996!
After the publication of the book, Katie.com became associated with Katie Tarbox and her story. Katie Jones could no longer use the domain without being assumed to be Tarbox, and kept getting emails about sex abuse etc meant for Katie Tarbox. Even if the publisher of the book (Penguin) had not known katie.com was already registered, they could have done a simple google search of the name! What’s worse is that the publisher’s lawyers proceeded to ask Katie Jones to donate her domain to them.
If we analyze this from a Kantian point of view, and derive the moral rule “If I have a book with a certain domain name as a title, I can ask the actual domain name owner to give me the domain” then say I want the name christine.com. I mean, look at my domain name now. See-why.net is just a lame pun on my initials (CY), I really want my real name as my domain but it is already registered. So if I publish (self publish!) a random book (after all Kantianism ignores circumstances), I can then use the book as a reason for the real owner of christine.com to give me the domain. Let’s make it more universal, and anyone who wants any domain can publish a book with the domain title and then ask the domain’s real owner to give them the domain. Then the meaning of owning the domain is contradicted because anyone could publish a book and ask you to give them their domain at any time. So the publishers acted wrongly according to Kantianism.
Really I cannot see any “happiness” as an outcome for this action by the book’s publisher. Katie Jones was having her domain hijacked which is obviously negative. And Katie Tarbox is having her tragic story be tarnished and degraded by association to an immoral attempt at hijacking a domain by her publisher. The actions of the book’s publisher really puzzle me. What were they thinking??