Oh .. my .. goodness. I don't check Fauna for a few days and some trolls go and spatter fecal matter all over the place...
Gary, since you keep posting about Webslave buying the kingsnakes.com domain (even after the other thread was closed) and asking if it's ethical, in my opinion, the question is moot.
I have worked for internet companies, ranging from entertainment to education and marketing, since I graduated from college.
Ever since people first started buying domain names, it's been a well known fact that in order to secure your name, you must buy the rights to all the domain names you feel your organization might use. For example, I own several .com sites, but I didn't buy the corresponding .net, .org, .biz or .info domains. If some jerk comes along and buys one of those other domains, I'm out of luck.
It is the organization's responsibility to buy up and protect domain names if they are available.
Rich did not HIJACK a domain (which sometimes happens - a hacker can mess with DNS settings and illegally switch one domain name that they never paid for to point at a site). What he did is perfectly legal.
You say "yeah, but that doesn't mean it's ethical"... but it IS, however, marketing. You don't like it? Well, you're entitled to that opinion. Is it "wrong"? Not from my standpoint. If the owner of Kingsnake thought there might be confusion if someone bought kingsnakeS.com - well, he should have bought it himself.
As it was, Rich didn't hijack anything. But come on, stop talking on and on about how evil he was for purchasing an AVAILABLE domain name. What next, are you going to complain about how retailers pad the cost of a product so they can make money, when the actual product cost them much less? Have you written to Michael Jackson to complain how mean he was for buying the copyrights to many Beatles songs while no one was paying attention?
Sorry for my ire. But believe me, there are a LOT WORSE things that happen on the internet. Someone owning a porn site could have bought KingsnakeS.com instead and make a lot more people probably never get to kingsnake.com (and probably made them not want to search for the site again, either).
Furthermore Rich did not make a site that impersonates Kingsnake.com - I believe you or someone else (perhaps in the other thread) mentioned that eBay won a lawsuit against another company that bought a domain name that had "ebay" in it. Are you aware of all the eBay-cloned sites that have been created by dishonest people to try and make you think you are on the REAL ebay.com so that you will enter your ebay name and password, so they can steal that info? THAT, my friend, is why eBay pursued the lawsuit, not because of the domain name alone. I could go and buy my-own-ebay.com, and not be sued, as long as I didn't try to make people believe that it was really ebay.com.
I actually think that buying kingsnakes.com was funny. Do I laugh at the misfortune of children? No. Am I cruel? No. But in order to survive in online communities, you have to be savvy, and when people like you complain about such fluffy issues, I laugh. Not everything is black and white, and questions of ethics are very fuzzy, no matter what field you are dealing with. Yes, Rich did that to annoy the owner of kingsnake.com - but it was a LEGAL annoyance. Like running your lawnmower at 7am on a Saturday morning when you know your neighbors worked late the night before.
Sorry for adding more spew to the thread, but I couldn't stand it....