Re: Trademarks, random strings, sharing, reserved words

[Simon Higgs <simon@higgs.com>]

At 1:25 PM -0800 12/28/96, Karl Auerbach wrote:

> > 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.
>

Absolutely. See below.

> 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:

I would suggest that the TLD must not imply any trademark of any sort.
However, the trademark categories are useful for making divisions or
defined areas within the name space for like-organizations to be
grouped together. This is no different than the original principles for
creating .COM and .EDU.

>      a) A trademark will probably be registered in multiple tlds.

No doubt, but it is possible to limit this by creating new areas of the
namespace in a way which would prevent this. You wouldn't find record
companies under a medical area.

>      b) A domain name label at any level will still be contested
>         by the trademark holder holder.

Not if it is outside the area that the trademark holder conducts business in.

>      c) Thus the "this is a trademark" suffix is nothing but a placebo.
>

And a big one at that!

> 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.
>

This will happen anyway with case law.

> > 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.
>

I have to say that the IAHC can go a long way to LIMIT name space
conflicts by the way they allow the name space to grow. This is
something they have real, direct power over now. If they fail to
address this now, the consequences will become exponential and they may
not be easily fixed later (if at all).

Regards,

Simon

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