Re: Trademarks, random strings, sharing, reserved words

[Karl Auerbach <karl@CaveBear.com>]

> It seems perhaps too obvious to me that the trademark problem is
> trivially solved by setting up a new tmTLD for use by TradeMark
> Offices, which can use them to register trademarks as strings in their
> trunk of the DNS tree.

This has been discussed at great length already on this list.

The general result (from my point of view, others will disagree) is that:

1. Focusing on trademarks to the exclusion of other ways that people and
   organizations hold rights to use names is unfair to the latter and
   raises trademark to an undeserved status with powers far beyond those
   accorded to trademark holders by the laws of any nation.

2. Simply appending a "this is a trademark" suffix does not eliminate the
   need for trademark holders to police the way there name is used in
   other contexts.  As a consequence, this means that:
     a) A trademark will probably be registered in multiple tlds.
     b) A domain name label at any level will still be contested
        by the trademark holder holder.
     c) Thus the "this is a trademark" suffix is nothing but a placebo.

3. We could suggest that such suffixes be provided and indicate our desire
that over time that the legal systems of the various nations give
weight to these indicators.

> And then our beloved TM folk can go away and leave us alone!  

We are bringing trademarks into this ourselves.  We should just 100%
ignore the relative rights of mark owners, of people, of corporations
(corporate names are not necessarily trademarks), of churches, of
associations, etc, etc.

The most the report should say(*) is "This problem is beyond our scope, we
just create a registration system.  The resolution of disputes
between natural or legal persons is left to the dispute resolving
mechanism of the various nations."

(*) This is modulo the waiting period, which we have (possibly) provided
to allows the dispute resolution mechanisms a chance to at least get
started and give notice to the parties.

		--karl--