RE: 60 day thought

[Robert Frank <bobf@corsearch.com>]

At 06:30 PM 12/21/96 -0600, Christopher Sevcik wrote:
>
>There are thousands and thousands of trademarks.  The companies >which have either the most money or the most resources, pay >organizations to monitor pending trademark requests to ensure there is >no conflict of interest....
>
>ok, what if a genuine trademark holder DID NOT pay for this service?
>
>...I know ignorance is no excuse, but I can't imagine every single
>trademark holder is going to catch the domains to be, within the 60 day
>period....in time to raise a flag and raise dispute.

>End result:  60 days solves only a small percentage of valid claims.

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I am the president of one of those organizations that companies pay to
monitor pending trademark registrations.  Based on 13 years of experience
I can tell you that over 25,000 trademarks are "watched" (monitored) by
companies such as mine which in the scope of things is a rather small
percentage of the millions of marks that are registered throughout the
world.  Lots of monitoring is done by law firms or law departments of
corporations who weekly review the pending trademarks publications of
various countries.  But just in looking at the workload of the US Trademark
Trial and Appeal Board (where oppositions are filed after publication and
before registration) alot of disputes are resolved *before* the second-comer
has a chance to invest alot in a new name and before damage occurs to 
either party.  An opposition period with some type of arbitration would, IMHO, be quite beneficial.  But I am not sure how we get the third party (the trademark owner who is not seeking the domain name) to agree to
binding arbitration.  If someone wanted to register coresearch.xxx, I
am not sure I would be willing to agree to binding arbitation unless I
was sure that the arbitrators had some good knowledge of tm law.  Again,
this was one of the flaws of the older NSI policy.  Often companies would
prefer to take their chances with a Federal judge.

Robert Frank
CORSEARCH, Inc.
NY, NY