Re: Trademarks, random strings, sharing, reserved words

[Brad Templeton <brad@alto.clari.net>]

> Of course not, but I still have not heard the alternative, except one that would
> give the right to some trademark owners to use their trademark in the domain
> name and deny it to others (that is, first-come, first-served), or one that
> would open up an infinite number of spaces, which is the trademark-owner's
> policing nightmare.
> 
> If anyone has a suggestion that would cover the multiplicity problem *and* allow
> for user-friendly domain names, I would love to hear it (and will send them a
> cigar!).

I don't smoke, but I feel that there have been many workable plans.
First of all, the plan that trademarks must include their context solves almost
all the problems except for extremely strange geographic splits of TMs.
Ie. it is legally possible for one company to hold a TM in 25 states and 100
countries and anotehr company thold the same exact TM in the other 25 states
and another 100 countries, but this is very rare.  Perhaps numeric codes
should be used there.  But this is very rare.

Other than that people keep forgetting that "apple" is not a TM of anybody
on its own.  There are many apple companies, and the fact that apple.com
is Apple Computer's does not stop Apple Records from having
apple.records.tm.int -- and it is in no way an infringement of Apple Records
TM to have Apple Computer using apple.com.   Apple.com is not a valid  TM
use.   If Apple Computer used apple.com to sell records instead of Macs,
Apple Records would ahve the right to stop them in ordinary civil court.

So let's have many top level domains, and nobody is *stopped* from using their
TM.   They are only stopped from using it in a form in which it is not a TM,
namely without a context.  


While nobody suggests an infinite number of domains, I fail to see why having
many is a policing nightmare.   Frankly, I think it's the complete opposite.
Trademark policing in the old media world is a nightmare.  Doing it in the
online world, where you can easily make (and in many cases already ahve)
comprehensive online directories is a trademark policer's wet dream.

Naturally if you want the sys tem can require gTLD owners to provide their
data for a global whois database that can be easily searched.

But don't have the DNS solve trademark disputes.  That was NSI's error.
The courts are there to do that.  We can make their job easier, and should,
but it is folly to suggest that we can solve it.

A 60 day waiting period has little meaning.  If I manage to register
coca.cola.foo and Coke doesn't see it in 60 days, they can and will still
sue to stop it when they do see it, and they will not have diminished their
right to do so because they ddin't scan the name proposal pending list.

So it solves little and causes hassle and delay.

We must get rid of the special status of .com.  This status causes people
to think that "foo.com" is the only "real" domain for somebody using the name
"foo" and thus you have conflicts.  If people stop thinking that the problem
is resovled, mostly.