Linguistic chaos

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

Here are a couple of other examples of how the international venue makes
the concept of a trademark into linguistic chaos.

Suppose someone registers MOBIL.INET

No doubt the gazette readers will be offering their services to the Mobil
Oil Company to dispute this registration before the courts before the 60
days are up. But wait a minute, what if it wasn't registered in the USA? 
If this name is registered by an Indonesian person, then what can Mobil
Oil do in front of the American courts? I suppose the answer is nothing,
they will have to take the matter up before the courts in Indonesia which
will be quite costly for them. Even then, they are guaranteed to lose the
case; fortunately it will be laughed out of court quite quickly. The
reason? The courts will see that there could be no possible trademark
infringement when one of Indonesia's largest car dealers registers
MOBIL.INET because MOBIL is a common word in Bahasa Indonesia. It means
car.

The next uproar comes when SEMEN.INET is registered. The League for
Purification of the Internet will be demanding that Congress ban filthy
words from the Internet where children might see them. However, no matter
what the US may do, this does not change the fact that SEMEN is Bahasa
Indonesia for CEMENT and SEMEN.INET is a perfectly legitimate domain name
for a Cement company in one of the world's fastest growing economies in
the world's 15th largest country.

Now, until today, I did not speak a single word of Bahasa Indonesia. In
fact, I didn't even know that was the name of Indonesia's language. But
after a couple of hours looking at websites about Bahasa Indonesia or
written in Bahasa Indonesia, I discovered two potential problems. 

Those of us in the Western world are heavily biased linguistically because
our native languages have mostly developped from the same roots and have
been heavily influenced by Latin over the past 1500 years or so. But most
of the world speaks languages whose vocabulary does not bear even the
slightest resemblance to Indo-European languages and large parts of this
world are now flooding onto the Internet.

Domain name owners will sue CORE because they are forced to wait 60 days
before opening up their websites.

Trademark owners will sue CORE because they are forced to wait 60 days to
find out if the domain name owner is really infringing. In the case
of Mobil Oil acting against MOBIL.INET in the Indonesian courts, that
could be very expensive. And suppose that MOBIL.INET withdraws the domain
without going to court simply on the basis of threatening lawyer's
letters? Then what? Well, the following month a Turkish company will
register MOBIL.INET because they think it is a catchy abbreviation
for the Turkish word OTOMOBIL. 

IMHO, CORE/IAHC simply has to say that there is *NOTHING* that they can do
that will help users or domain owners or trademark owners. And thus
CORE/IAHC should not have a 60 day waiting period.

If IAHC does not heed this we may see some *VERY* strange lawsuits against 
Network Solutions. As soon as they announce that they will participate
in the shared domain system, there will be dozens of lawsuits launched
against them to obtain injunctions *FORCING* NSI to maintain exclusive
control over .COM, .ORG and .NET because to do otherwise would constitute
an illegal act of collusion to restrain trade and would open NSI to triple
damages under the RICO statutes. You see, If NSI won't play the game, the
60 day rule cannot come into effect.

Does the IAHC really, really, really want to create this kind of
wierdness?

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael@memra.com