Re: 60 day waiting period -- look at the facts!

[Carl Oppedahl <carl@oppedahl.com>]

At 11:50 AM 01/06/97 -0800, Einar Stefferud wrote:

>So Dave, with a 60 day waiting period, the willful challenger just
>waits till day 59 and then lodges a complaint.  

Keep in mind *who* one lodges a complaint with.  Under the IAHC proposal,
the complaint is lodged with a court.  And someone who waits until the 59th
day to file their complaint with a court, having taken no previous steps to
raise their concern with the domain name owner, is going to find it
difficult or impossible to talk the court into granting a preliminary
injunction.  

>Are you saying that the prudent business person will wait until day 61
>to start investing?
>
>Are you speaking for yourself when you say such a thing?  
>Is there really how you operated when you set up IMC.ORG?
>
>Why do I seriously doubt that you behave the way you predict that
>others will?  In short, I do not believe you;-)...
>
>Why do I find so many of the supporting comments about 60 days are
>full of unsupported hypothetical expectations of human behavior, and
>no foundation in law to support how 60 days of waiting (or any days of
>waiting) will actually make anything good happen.

Someone said, a couple of weeks ago, that the most important value here is
*stability* of URLs.  The Web only works if URLs are stable, for example.
A URL that is based on a domain name that survived a 60-day waiting period
is far, far more likely to be stable than a URL in a universe in which
trademark owners (and courts) will think that such complaints can be raised
years after registration.

Domain name     Date registered         date challenged
clue.com        June 1994               early 1996
regis.com       April 1993              mid-1996
dci.com         August 1993             early 1996
disc.com        January 1993            mid-1996
juno.com        December 1994           late 1996

At present, in COM, there is no waiting period.  Grabby trademark owners
seem to be quite unembarassed at presenting claims two and three years
after the domain name was registered.  The result is that domain names (and
the URLs on which they depend) are quite unstable.  A domain name owner may
find his or her domain name in jeopardy at any time, no matter how long
they have had it.

With the 60-day period being followed, a grabby trademark owner will have a
hard time explaining why they waited until long after the 60-day period to
gripe about the domain name.

Let's state this clearly.  Stability of URLs is very, very important to the
Internet.  More important, I suggest, than instant registry of domain
names.  (And please recall that if somebody needs a domain name in a hurry,
they can always simply register a third- or fourth-level domain name, and
obtain what they want instantly.)


---
Carl Oppedahl, Oppedahl & Larson, patent law firm
http://www.patents.com/ has hundreds of pages of answers to 
frequently asked questions on patent, copyright, and trademark law