Re: Who really benefits from 60-day period?

[Daniel Kalchev <daniel@digsys.bg>]

>Leo Smith wrote:
>
>> There will be a tremendous amount of inconvenience and hassle endured
>> by the wait-ers. By all counts, less than four tenths of one percent of
>> users would ever be affected by any claim of trademark infringement...So why
>> put
>
>Another reason for the 60 day waiting period is to minimize intentional
>hoarding, hijacking and speculation in domain names.
>
>This is a problem much larger than most realize.

This undoubtely is a large problem, but how would the 60 day 'display 
period' afect the problem? There are two implementation variants:

1) during the 60 day period the applicant is not alowed to use the domain 
name (and it is eventualy not inserted in DNS).

This procedure will be delaying probably larger number of the legitimate 
domain name requests than speculative domain name registrations. This may 
create the public opinion that the Domain Name Registries are using 
beurocratic procedures (which is true to some extent even now). However, 
having all TLD registries follow the same procedure (is this realistic?) 
may reduce the public pressure.

Another issue, which is not explained in the proposal is the early 
identification of the applicant. How valid canbe the claim: "The domain 
name XYZ.COM has been requested by John Q Public <jqp@somewhere.edu>, who 
gave the postal address ..., and intends to use the domain name for a 
personal web server.". If the registry has to wait for the paper 
documentation to arrive - which in countries like Bulgaria is the 'legal 
proof' that the request has indeed been made and by whom - and then 
applies the 60 day public exposure period the wait time may become 
untolerable.

Also, what will likely happen is that some lately awaken and rich 
companies will sit around, watching for their startup competition to try 
to register new domain name and immediately challenge it - this may 
continue forever. What will happen if the 'trademark owner' turns out to 
be falsely claiming trademark ownership, resulting in delay (eventualy 
loss of business) for the applicant? Who is guilty for the situation - 
the domain name applcant, the 'trademark owner' or the registry?

2) If the domain name can be used immediately, and the 60 day period of 
'public exposure' is in place, there is not much difference from the 
current situation, where the new domain name is immediately exposed when 
inserted (published) in DNS.

The feeling that the proposal leaves is that the 60 day period is to 
protect the rights of the trademark owners. However, this is 
controversal, because according to the proposal there exist at least 
three types of domain names: 

a) "interesting domain names", such as cocacola.bg;
b) "trademarked domain names", such as cocacola.tm.bg;
c) "useless domain names", such as gfhsd6565.bg.

Apparently, the proposal does not attach any value to the later, although 
it may happen they are infringing on a trademark - the registry has no 
way to know which randomly generated strings may be valid trademarks.

The two remaining types of domain names are confusing. If there is 
cocacola.tm.bg, which is supposed to mean the cocacola trademark in 
Bulgaria (eventualy verified by long and expensive procedure with the 
local trademark or patent office!!!) - then what is cocacola.bg? Why two 
of those?

Another issue is that there is absolutely no guarantee that the afected 
trademark owner will notice the new application infringes on their 
trademark for these 60 days. In any case, they are likely to anyway bring 
to counrt the domain name owner, if the perceived value of the domain 
name is high.

Daniel Kalchev
BG-NIC
-
<daniel@digsys.bg>