Re: 60 day waiting peroid.

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

On Fri, 20 Dec 1996, Dave Crocker wrote:

> 1.  You register a name and begin to use it immediately.  You "invest" in
> that name significantly, even if only to place it on your business cards.
> Along comes someone contesting your use and take you to court and forces
> you to give it up.  Start over, having wasted time and money, and having to
> re-inform folks of your new/next name.
> 
> 2.  You register a name and wait 2 months.   You are challenged and have to
> give up the name.  YOu have little invested, since you haven't started
> using it.
> 
> 	I would choose 2.  What makes it so onerous?

Well, time is money for one.

I would choose 1. It is not the responsibility of the registry or the DNS
system or CORE or IAHC or IANA or ISOC that I was foolish enough to 
register exxon.biz and have $5,000 worth of business cards and stationary
printed. The same thing could happen with incorporating a new company
and the government's registrar of companies would not have any
responsibility for this.

If anything needs to be done at all about the possibility of trademark
infringement I can see only two reasonable things at this point.

One would be to have all domain name registrants agree to a disclaimer
that warns them that their right to use the domain name is limited by
international law and the law of their own country. 

And another would be to provide a daily gazette of all new registrations,
changes, and deletions with complete info. This could be made available as
a daily email digest and a website. Anyone interested can subscribe to the
gazette, wade through all the detail, and act accordingly. No doubt some
companies will offer a service of digesting this info into more usable
form just as companies do this with other gazettes. 

While I can understand that the trademark law community might like a 60
day grace period, I think that they could be content with no grace period
if they were offered a guaranteed information flow in the form of the
gazette and if the entire gTLD domain name registration database were made
available to them in some reasonable form. Obviously, the email gazette
could be designed to be machine parseable and could be treated as a
transaction stream to update their own database. If it was also possible
to pay a fee and get a current snapshot of the full database then I think
their needs for access to information would be satisfied.

Since some legal systems require people to explicitly agree for their info
to be made public this virtually requires a snail-mailed or faxed document
with a signature in order to register a domain name. If this is the case,
adding a reasonable disclaimer should be no problem. And if anyone thinks
that dealing with the paperflow would be impossible, I would like to point
out that the insurance industry, the banking industry and the finance
industry have many well developped techniques and technologies for dealing
with this.


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