Categorization and ``friendly'' lookup (was Thread 2: 60-day issue)

[David Collier-Brown <davecb@Canada.Sun.COM>]

Karl Auerbach and Michael Dillon wrote:
> 
> > > Not all all disputes will be involve trademark.  There could be a dispute
> > > over blap.xxx between The Church of the Lesser Blap, John Q. Blap, and
> > > Blap Chemicals, Inc.
> >
> >
> > blap.church.cat (assuming they belong to the International Council of Churches)
> > john.blap.alt
> > blap.chemicals.biz

  If we provide a mechanism for allowing subdivision within the
various upper-level domains (and gTLDs), then we might well
see just this kined of self-sorting of communities...  However
that's not what jumps out at me here.

However, karl said> 
> I don't think that this will avoid disputes.  It's my opinion that the
> suffixes may be considered meaningless.  

  This risk is exacerbated by ``friendly'' lookup systems.  If I 
do a prefix search on a database of domains, I'll get both
blap.church.cat and blap.chemicals.biz, and not john.blap.*
  This tends to mean that church.cat and chemicals.biz had
better be **very good* disambuiguators, lest the chemicals
folks simply ignore the fact that blap is a church and start
threatening them with penalties for diluting their trademark.

  A large-scale lookup system would need carefull design by folks
who've fought the restricted-vocabularity index wars before, or they'll
create a mechanism by which a trademark owner, say disney.tm.int,
will be **actively encouraged** to threaten fred.disney.podunk.ka.us.

  This would, in my humble opinion, be a Bad Thing, and could occur
with the curerrent proposal.

--dave (drat!) c-b
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | Always do right. This will gratify some people
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