Re: Exclusive License

["Leo Smith" <barter@ntplx.net>]

>David Collier-Brown wrote:
:    The law firms compete for customers in a fairly free market,
: and need legal protection so they can in fact compete without others
: taking advantage of their good name and misapplying it to themselves.
: To ensure that .law, .legal and .atty domains could compete, the
: right of the lawyers to compete is diminished: they've just lost
: trademark protection!
----------

If a valid trademark exists, then under trademark law no person may
infringe on it. If your law firm holds a legal trademark in the field of
law to the name JONE'S, and if your law firm meets other conditions as set
forth under trademark law, then you would have the right to have the
exclusive use of JONES.LAW, JONES.LEGAL, JONES.ATTY, or any other set where
your legally trademarked name is used as part of the address.
An example of trademark rights on a global basis would be PEPSI. If Pepsi
holds valid worlwide trademark rights to the name Pepsi, then no other
company can delute the value of Pepsi's trademarked name, by using the word
PEPSI as a SLD name for ANY gTLD. Suppose Pepsi decided to purchase only
one URL address, and decided they wanted it to be PEPSI.SODA. No other
company could come in and take PEPSI.DRINK, or PEPSI. anything else, since
to do so would be an infringement on Pepsi's trademark.

Pepsi, on the other hand, when deciding which registry to use, might find
.soda available from the licensee for $500 a year, or from a sublicensee
for $300, or they could find that .drink was available for $50 a year from
another registry/licensee.
After shopping price, they then have the freedom to choose to go with .soda
or .drink or.com, whatever they want. they're free to choose in a free
market environment

Just because they choose pepsi.soda does not mean that someone else could
legally use PEPSI as SLD name, in combination with ANY remaining gTLD name
choices.

Because PEPSI is trademarked worldwide, only PEPSI can use PEPSI. Yet there
can still be multiple registries, each of which has an exclusive license to
a gTLD name that has some value to PEPSI. 

It will be these multiple registries that will compete among themselves for
PEPSI's business.