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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowBall State actually has bought up some Internet domains names with a new suffix meant for pornography sites in order to prevent school-related names from being misused.
A university spokeswoman had said this week that Ball State wouldn't be buying site names using the ".xxx" suffix. Spokeswoman Joan Todd told The Star Press of Muncie that she was earlier misinformed and that school officials filed in October to secure the naming rights for ballstate.xxx, bsu.xxx and some variations.
Officials at Indiana, Purdue, Notre Dame, Indiana State and other schools have taken similar steps.
Other universities have paid for 10-year rights to domain names such as Purdue.xxx, Indianauniversity.xxx and Hoosiers.xxx to order to keep their names from being connected to pornography sites and to protect the schools' trademarks.
IU said it would pay $2,200 to buy 11 Internet domain names.
IU trademarks director Valerie Gill told the The Herald-Times of Bloomington that without the purchases, if someone else were to start using domain names with an IU connection, it would cost IU several thousand dollars to fight it legally.
The .xxx top level domain is aimed at giving adult content providers a natural place on the Internet, though the porn industry has been critical of the plan that some say is the first step in forcing them to move to the more easily blockable domain addresses.
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