Re: 60 day thought

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Carl Oppedahl allegedly said:
> 
> At 06:30 PM 12/21/96 -0600, Christopher Sevcik wrote:
[...]
> 
> >End result:  60 days solves only a small percentage of valid claims.
> 
> There are answers to your questions, and here they are.
> 
> In the area of trademarks, ignorance is indeed no excuse.  A trademark
> owner who fails to "police their mark" will be deemed to have abandoned it.
>  Right now in the US trademark law there is something called an "opposition
> period".  When someone applies for a US trademark registration, there comes
> a time when the pending application is "published for opposition".  During
> that time it's easy for anybody to present their gripe if they have one.
> After that, it is incredibly more difficult to do so, generally requiring
> court or other lawyer-intensive measures.  And indeed someone who snoozes,
> loses.  

This statutory wait is completely independent from whether DNS is
activated or not.

> Under the IAHC proposal it would also be that "you snooze, you lose".  Not
> that a trademark owner would be completely unable to get a domain name cut
> off after the 60 days, but at least they would have to go to court and come
> up with some good reason why they didn't oppose it during the 60 days. 

According to comments by IAHC members, they have to go to court to
stop activation of the name anyway.  Absolutely the only effect of the
60 day wait is to delay activation in DNS.  It will be activated after
the 60 days regardless of protests by others.  Only court action will
stop it, or or the voluntary abandonment of the name by the owner.

It might be argued that since the name isn't active the owner will be 
more inclined to give it up in the face of a strongly worded letter, 
instead of requiring court action.  I don't see this as an advantage.

The idea of publishing the names online for 60 days makes a *lot* of
sense, and I expect publication will have a very positive effect on
trademark issues.  However, I have not yet seen a coherent argument
for delaying activation of DNS for 60 days as well. 

The disadvantages are much more concrete.  In addition to the 
business effects that have been described, there is another 
disadvantage that I think is much more serious:  the 60 day wait 
impacts *every* domain holder, regardless of whether there is any 
trademark significance to the name.  I have no concrete data on the 
percentage of domain names in .com that are trademarks, but the 
percentage must be fairly small.  And consider the case of a 
hypothetical .per domain, intended for personal domains -- every one 
of the people who get a name there has to wait 60 days.

This gets to a point I consider a much more serious flaw in the 
document -- the homogenization of all the gTLDs.  There is no 
mechanism established for different policies for different gTLDs.  

-- 
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