Re: Conflict resolution?

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

On 21 Nov 96 at 12:33, Leonid Egoshin wrote:

>You are, respectfully, both wrong.  The problem is that a domain name
> is not automatically a trademark use and more significantly, as I
>have pointed out here and elsewhere for a year, the problem is that
>TM's are registered in 42 international classes, and unless the
>domain name system deals with this, you could have 42 TM owners, at a
> minimum, demanding their right to the same domain name.  Even with
>42 classes, it is also possible to have hundreds or thousands of
>valid TM's in one country for the same word.  Look up in any TM
>database the words  "United"  "Allied" "U.S. x x x" or "bass" - the
>latter of which has 762 or more valid marks in the US PTO.

    It is true for current DNS system. But I can propose some slight
modification of DNS search engine which can serve multiple TM domains
in the follows order:

 Then user type "name", then:

1)  find "name" in TM subdomain which contained trademarks for 
 a) zone of local trademark law and 
 b) in user-selected class,

2) if not found - try next classes in the same zone,

3) if not found - repeat procedure for "federal" zone subdomain.
 (this subdomain is more short in comparison with previous,
  and it remind normal DNS hierarhial search engine)

And additional rule - if user type "name.country" then search
started from level of that country, if user type "name.state.country"
then search started from level of this state in this country.

   This is not full protocol, of course, but if we follow some rules
during maintenance of TM domains, then it don't grab large resources.

   Also it is possible to take in account multiple words TMs.

   That you think about it ?

     - Leonid Yegoshin, LY22

>>This could work, but as I understand what you propose, IACH or IANA 
would have to have access to all the TM databases in the world, many 
of which are not yet on computers, or at least not on line. 
Furthermore, the database will be huge since there are probably 15 to 
25 million trademarks and registered names or designs in the records 
of the developed countries. At least all countries use a uniform 
classification system.

>>This still does not deal with the fact that all domain names are 
not being used by the owners as trademarks -- such as those that just 
represent a domain used for email, and not webpages or ftp sites.

gerry


gerry
G. Gervaise Davis III, Business and Intellectual Property Lawyer
Davis & Schroeder P.C., P.O. Box 3080, Monterey, CA 93942
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