Re: Analogs to trademarks and domain names

[David Collier-Brown <davecb@Canada.Sun.COM>]

Michael Dillon wrote:
> Just because the white pages of the phone book has companies listed does
> not make the white pages into a commercial directory. While there are no
> perfect analogies, the DNS is a lot like the phone directory white pages.
> It is simply a directory in which you can look up domain names and get an
> IP address. In a typical white pages phone book (outside major metro
> areas) you start by looking up the town or city, then look up the surname,
> and then the first name or initial or street address to narrow down the
> one number that you need.
> 
> > Domain names are absolutely commercial in most cases.
> 
> There is no evidence that this is the case. And even if there was it would
> be irrelevant. I'm sure that at one time most phone numbers were
> commercial due to the high cost of owning a phone. But eventually the cost
> became more reasonable and commercial phone numbers were outnumbered by
> non-commercial numbers. The same will happen with domain names. 

  It's probably usefull to compare domain names and registries of
them to coats of arms.

  These predate trademarks, as it happens, were allocated by claiming
them, first-come, first-served, and didn't have a substructure.  If
you had arms, they were universal.  (This is not entirely true any more,
but not many people use them now, so it's less relevant).

  They started to allow recognition: like motorcycle gangs, my 
ancestors wanted to be recognized at a distance (:-))
  They were usually simple designs painted on shields and worn on
sleeveless jackets over armor, and were every bit as important at
the time as painting "COW" on your bovines during hunting season is
now...  
  If you didn't do it, you might be mistaken for prey!

   Because everyone was a possible (if not probable) enemy, they were
unique.  If two people found they were using the same symbol, they
tended to change them overnight, lest they end up on the opposite side
of a battle and cause fatal confusion.

   Over time, people collected paintings of them, and published
reference books to them.  At the same time, they became more
permanent.  People started creating variants for second sons,
familys who had merged by marriage of the heirs and so forth.

   Returning to the current century, you can see that they were
a recognition device with a weak lookup system, and lots of dependance
on memory-work.  You were just expected to see them and **know**.
   And in one sense, they were commercial: they indicated who a
landowner or landholder was.  And land was the original wealth.
But this was not the modern or even medieval sense of commercial, so
I'll drop the subject[2].

   They carried quite strong implications, just as does a domain.
Anything ``in'' a domain is assumed to be intimately related to the
``owner'' of the domain, or it wouldn't be there.
   Similarly, the staff of a landowner often wore his badge, a 
form of his coat of arms in minature..
This indicate that the landowner was in some sense responsible for
the badge-wearer, as the rightfull owner of the arms had the right of at
least ``low justice'' against any wearer of the badge.  So other
people could trust the wearer of a nearby landowner's badge, because
their landowner could speak to the other and normally obtain summary
judgement. And if not, would avenge any misdeeds on the person
of the other landowner!

  This has a strong parallell to hosts.equiv or ACL files in the present
day: if I ``wear the badge'' of a site, some other sites might
allow me ``limited citizenship''. Especially if the badge is a
cryptographic signature and the site which issued it makes guarantees
about disciplining its people.

   With all these parallells, I can quite seriously commend ``coats
of arms'' to you as a less loaded but analogous[3] term to trademark
when trying to reason about domain names.
   
--dave
--
[1] I forget: was gules the old name for green?  I wasn't alive at
the       time, see...
[2] Before some enraged gentleborn drops me with an axe to the head
    as stalks off mumbling about ``accusations of being in trade''
[3] John Campbell's definition: where A, B ::= similar sets, R ::=
    a relation allowing legitimate comparison exists, i ::= an index:
    for all i, R[A[i],B[i]] -> ( A[i] -> B[i]).
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | Always do right. This will gratify some people
185 Ellerslie Ave.,   | astonish the rest.        -- Mark Twain
Willowdale, Ontario   | davecb@hobbes.ss.org, canada.sun.com
N2M 1Y3. 416-223-8968 | http://java.science.yorku.ca/~davecb