Re: Conflict resolution?

["G. Gervaise Davis III" <ggd@iplawyers.com>]

Tony - as an IP lawyer inundated with pleas for help by small businesses 
and individuals who are having their domain names hijacked by large, 
well financed companies who have simply realized that the little guy 
cannot afford to litigate with them, I vehemently disagree that they 
were worked out amiciably - these little guys are the victims of sledge 
hammer attacks by big business - taking advatange of a poorly thought 
out policy by a company (NSI) that simply wants to protect itself from 
angry trademark holders and possible contributory trademark infringement 
liability. NSI and Internic could solve this by leaving the parties to 
the federal courts, where most of the big companies would not dare take 
these cases, because their lawyers would be in contempt of Rule 11 that 
requires a reasonable assertion of their clients cases, and these 
lawyers know that in most of the cases I mention above the big business 
has no trademark case, only a right under nsi's policy to bludegon these 
little guys.

There is hardly a day goes by that I or my partners do not get a plea 
from these innocent victims for pro bono help, which we give when we can 
but we also have to make a living with fee paying clients. Please think 
about this aspect of the issues and collect the real facts.

gerry davis
ggd@iplawyers.com


Tony Rutkowski wrote:
> 
> Gert,
> 
> >The way to resolve this is to make .com insignificant or to create
> >many better alternatives.  Then companies abroad have alternatives
> >to the overpopulated .com domain.
> 
> The difficulty here is that most businesses and the general public
> seem to have already expressed a strong preference for a single
> iTLD for very understandable reasons - it's simple - although this
> may offend our sensibilities about the way things should be.
> There already are other iTLD alternatives - they are just not
> regarded by a lot of customers as worthy of pursuit.
> 
> Rather like MacDonalds, there have been hundreds of thousands
> of .COMs served with almost trivially small numbers of complaints.
> Most businesses have simply worked around previously registered
> domains with some slight variant, and been quite pleased.  The
> disputes that remain are nothing more than legal and public policy
> questions - that do deserve attention by the responsible communities.
> 
> Has anyone thought to ask in any kind of quantitative way what
> the reaction of businesses and public are to the proliferation of
> additional iTLDs versus keeping things simple?  Isn't this a
> significant public interest consideration?
> 
> cheers,
> --Tony