Re: The trademark issue

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Gilles LERAT allegedly said:
> 
[snip]
> I will end up quoting the very good draft by Jon Postel:
> 	=AB  Domain names are intended to be an addressing mechanism and are not
> intended to reflect trademarks, copyright, or any other intellectual
> property rights =BB
> 
> Maybe (it is just a suggestion), the way the IAHC could handle the trademark
> issue is by emphasizing on the fact that registering a domain name does not
> give a person (or a company) any legal rights over that name.
> This also implies that an entity is not expected to register a domain name,
> whenever it knows it has no legal rights over that name (if it does so, the
> entity should expect legal trouble in courts).
> 
> I would be grateful to any kind of comments you might have on this message
> (no flames, please).

Giles, I agree with you.  In fact, I believe your conclusion is the 
only realistic possibility, and I hope you continue to advertise it.

On a different topic, a friend of mine and I were discussing various 
schemes for supporting shared registries, all of which require some 
form of cryptographic authentication.  To be concrete, suppose that 
when NSI's contract runs out in '98 that .com becomes a shared TLD, 
and 35 companies sign up to manage .com as a shared TLD.

All the technical solutions for a protocol to support this require 
some kind of strong authentication -- if a company in France, for 
example, wanted to create miel.com, 1) it would have to be sure that 
some other registry somewhere else wasn't also creating miel.com at 
the same time, and 2) *all* the registries have to be sure that 
the only they can add new names -- if a message arrives from France 
saying it's the registry and it wants to create miel.com, then they 
have to be sure that the message is from who it claims to be.

The only methods to do these things involve strong cryptography, and 
I understand that France has fairly restrictive laws regarding use of 
cryptography.  The question is, are the French laws such that it 
would be impossible for a private company to become a registry for 
.com, because of the fact that it would require using software with 
strong cryptographic algorithms?

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov		the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E  87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F