Domain Name Service (DNS) was created in 1983 out of the necessity to convert IP Addresses like 192.168.9.2 to domain names like example.com. DNS is a distributed database, what this means is that no one computer is used to maintain a complete database of all of the domains on the Internet. Instead this information is distributed across many computers.

Google sued over parked domain ads. Occult practices bound to typosquatting, domain tasting, domain parking or more generally to the Domain Name monetization seem directly aimed

OpenDomain.org is an organization that offers to provide free use of certain domain names to worthwhile open source projects. Ric Johnson, the leader of OpenDomain.org and the owner of dozens of domain names, says he has spent thousands of dollars registering those domains in order to prevent "squatters and phishers" from snapping them up.

“the internationalization of the Internet’s domain name system must be accomplished through standards that are open, non-proprietary, and fully compatible with the Internet’s existing end-to-end model and that preserve globally unique naming in a universally resolvable public name space” .

The European Commission has published a review of the Europeana digital library (remember that?). There's one critically important section, which touches on the hot issue of digitising public domain content:

Today, Creative Commons announces the release of the Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that clearly communicates that status to the public, and allows the works to be easily discovered over the Internet.

Every web site needs a domain name. Every domain name needs DNS. Yet, it’s often overlooked and misunderstood. If you own a domain you need to understand DNS. And here’s the low-down as well as some helpful Linux tools.

DJB (Daniel J. Bernstein), author of qmail, djbdns has announced in a conference Sage Days 6, declared all of his past and future code will be released to public domain.

It used to be that you could safely assume a work was public domain unless there was a highly visible warning printed on it, containing both the copyright owner and the date of copyright (at least in the USA). This system also ensured that, when the work’s copyright expired, you could tell from any copy that this was so—by simply adding the duration of copyright to the date printed in the work’s copyright notice. The Berne Convention, however, changed all that by replacing the assumption of freedom with the assumption of monopoly, and it now takes extensive research to be sure a work is public domain.