Re: trademark law

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

On Thu, 12 Dec 1996, Kent Crispin wrote:

> at least come close to it -- BSDI had a phone number that was
> something like "??4-UNIX", and were forced by AT&T to give it up. 

Of course, BSDI was and still is selling a UNIX compatible operating
system. AT&T could legitimately claim that the phone number wrongly made
it appear that they were selling the product which AT&T had trademarked.
If BSDI had been selling french fries the courts would not likely have
made the same decision.

During the same time period, SCO was also selling a UNIX compatible
operating system and they also had an 800 number ending in UNIX but since
they had licenced the UNIX trademark from AT&T they had no problems.

The telephone system had nothing to do with this. The 800 number
database has nothing to do with this.

Currently people are under the mistaken belief that domain names are
issued by some sort of US government regulatory agency due partially to
lack of knowledge and partially to NSI's misguided policies. But NSI is
not the DNS and NSI is not the Internet and NSI is not even a government
regulatory agency. Eventually new iTLD's will be deployed and people will
start to realize that a registry is merely a publisher of other people's
information. If the other people are violating your rights by giving the
registry certain information to publish then takle legal action against
the other people, not the registry. 

In fact, the registry has an obligation to not allow anyone other than the
orginator of the information to modify it. This is because the integrity
and stability of the DNS information published by a registry is vital to
the functioning of the Internet. If there is any legislation at all that
deals specifically with domain names I would like to see that legislation
protect registries from legal actions and proghibit registries from
allowing anyone other than the authorized domain name owner from
modifying/deleting domain name information. 

This does not in any way impede people whose trademarks are being
violated. They can still get court injunctions that order the domain name
owner to withdraw their domain name, or inactivate their domain name by
publishing a dummy DNS, or even better, to replace their home page with
one that announces the existence of the dispute. The registry is simply
not relevant at all to these legal actions as long as they make the
identity of the domain name owner completely public information.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael@memra.com