Re: Thread 2: 60-day issue

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Carl Oppedahl allegedly said:
> 
[...]
> 
> The answer in the case of #2 is, again there is no need to convince a judge
> of anything like that.  The party that needs to convince the judge of
> something is the trademark owner, who has the difficult task of explaining
> why, if mere ownership of a domain name counts as infringement, didn't the
> tradmark owner do something back during the 60-day period?  The honest
> trademark owner will not even bother to sue, knowing that it doesn't have a
> good answer to this question.

Eh? The honest trademark owner would say "How was I supposed to know 
about the 60 day period? -- I didn't know domain names existed back 
then."

Suppose I get the name "pepsico.com" -- Pepsi doesn't know the the
internet exists.  Pepsi wakes up one morning and discovers the
internet, and says "Hey, some joker is using 'pepsico.com'".  The
judge says "sorry, you should have complained during the 60 day
waiting period".  Pepsi's expensive lawyers tell the judge "there was
no legal requirement that we look at this web page we just found out
about.  We certainly could not be held responsible for knowing about
it."

And if ownership of a domain name does *not* constitute infringement
then what good does the 60 day wait do? I go get pepsico.com.  Pepsi
immediately sends me a letter, well within the 60 days.  I tell them
to go to hell -- they can pay me $600000 for the name, if they like,
but mere ownership of a domain name doesn't constitute infringement, 
so I intend to keep it...I now own something clearly valuable to 
Pepsi, and it's just a matter of negotiation, now.

-- 
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