Re: .COM TLD, DNS and the English Language

[Carl Oppedahl <carl@oppedahl.com>]

At 11:18 AM 12/11/96 -0500, Vince Wolodkin wrote:

>Carl Oppedahl wrote:
>> 
>> At 03:33 PM 12/10/96 -0500, Vince Wolodkin wrote:
>> 
>> >I agree, my main thrust is to move these issues into each country and
>> >remove them from the international scene.  I agree that a .TM or some
>> >other schema may be appropriate, but I believe it to be appropriate only
>> >if it is placed UNDER each ISO country TLD.  International TLD's will
>> >only cause international disputes.  International disputes have no
>> >suitable method to be resolved.  Get enough unsatisfactorily resolved
>> >international issues and governments will get involved.
>> >
>> >Doesn't it make sense to eliminate iTLDs rather than to create them?
>> >Doesn't it make sense to move disputes to local jurisdictions where they
>> >can be handled without international agreements?
>> 
>> Okay, help me out here.  A URL is a URL, right?  

[examples of cases where it seems to me trademark problems are just as bad
with two-letter country domains as with non-geographic domains]

>> I can't see how tacking a little old ".ca" at the end of the URL makes the
>> trademark infringement go away.
>
>I am not saying the trademark infringement goes away.  I am saying that,
>in terms of fighting infringement(and other disputes), the internet
>would become much more analgous with other industries.  Would you agree?

No, I don't think so.

The social change that is leading to trouble here is not tied to the
internal structure of URLs, I suggest.  The social change is simply that
worldwide communication is now free and easy.  That permits collisions
between people who would not have collided in the past.  A web site from
Italy can anger a business in Japan, and this sort of thing simply almost
never happened a decade ago for the simple reason that a decade ago very
little broadcast-type communication went from one country to the other.

Adding a couple of letters to a URL, or changing the rules for which
top-level domain a particular type of business may use, does not undo this
social change, it seems to me.  
---
Carl Oppedahl, Oppedahl & Larson, patent law firm
http://www.patents.com/ has hundreds of pages of answers to 
frequently asked questions on patent, copyright, and trademark law